


Rogues I (expanded) (2/2)

by thebasement_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-12-31
Updated: 2001-12-31
Packaged: 2018-11-20 12:07:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 49,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11335344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebasement_archivist/pseuds/thebasement_archivist
Summary: Accused of the violent murder of A.D. Skinner, Krycek and Mulder leave on a desperate cross-country trip, always one step ahead of their pursuit: the law, and strange forces Mulder doesn't fully understand.





	Rogues I (expanded) (2/2)

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Basement](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Basement), which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Basement's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thebasement/profile).

 

Rogues by Tabby

We're in the hot tub when the falcon alights nearby. "Aw, shit," Krycek says. "You crap in the tub and you're dead dog meat, birdie."

I giggle. "You are so funny, Alex."

"Well, I'm glad you think so. Shoo, shoo!" he says, waving his arm at the bird, who just settles and resettles his talons. "Listen, guy," he continues. "This gets old real fast. I'm so sick of being haunted," he says to me. "He won't leave me alone!"

"Well, you did kill him," I say philosophically. "It's kind of a classic haunting scenario."

"I'm gonna submerge," Krycek says. "When I come back up for air, I want to see that bird gone. Do you hear me, you?" he asks, looking at the peregrine, who looks back with equanimity. My lover takes a breath and goes underwater. He reminds me of a small child playing the hiding game: if I can't see you, you can't see me. When he pops back up the falcon is of course still there. "All right," he says, low. "Play it your way, you old bastard!" He climbs out of the tub, streaming water, grabbing a towel and heading into the house, from which he emerges a moment later, still naked as a jaybird, dripping wet and holding his Kalashnikov. The bird doesn't utter a sound, just rises into the air on magnificent wings, and is gone.

"I'll kill it, I swear I'll fuckin' kill it the next time I see it," he yells. "Bastard!" he screams at the heavens. From far above, the falcon cries the strange mocking cry of a predator. "Hey, Alex," I observe, when he's slipped back into the tub, "you can't kill a ghost, you know."

"I know," he says sullenly, "but I can kill its vehicle."

"Then he'd go back to haunting us with appliances and whatnot."

"Well, let him. I can handle that."

"Like you handled it at Gananian's house?" He is silent.

"Mulder," he says at last, "let's go inside and fuck. We'll close all the windows. I want you inside me."

" 'K," I say. On the way inside the house I smack his perfect rear.

"Oooh! Do that some more!" In the bedroom, I grab him and wrestle him onto the bed, pinning him under me. He is struggling but smiling, and he is very hard. So am I; I lube myself up and slide into him.

He gasps. "Mulder, I've been a bad boy!"

"Have you?" I ask, and smack him.

"Yes! Oh, Mulder, fuck me hard and spank me!"

"OK," I say, shoving hard into him and whacking him again on the ass. "You've been such a bad boy that you're gonna get a really good fucking and spanking," and I slap him again.

"More, more," he begs.

"Say, 'please, Master'," I say sternly and smack him again.

"Please! Please! OH MY GOD MULDER! MULLLLLDERR!" he screams, his body rigid, spasming. "Oh, God, Alex," I say, and come too, squirting hard and deep into his hot, tight ass.

"Mulder," he says afterward, rolling over, "that was just the most exquisite, intense fuck I've ever had. Thank you!"

"The pleasure was all mine, believe me," I say, kissing him, his perfect lips, his tiny nose. "I love you more than life, Alex."

"And I love you, Mulder."

"Alex, you're such a gorgeous guy. How did I get such a good-lookin' guy interested in homely ol' me?"

He leans on his elbow and laughs. "You're not homely, Mulder. You're very handsome, with a wonderful...um...body."

"Yes, and that too," I say, smiling. "I'm just feeling so lucky, Alex."

************************************************************************

The falcon has been sitting in the cottonwood tree for a couple hours now. It left for a while but returned, and it is up there, eating a field mouse and preening its pinfeathers, or whatever it is that falcons do; and I'm down here and I'm smoking, and I'm wondering. Wondering about psychopomps and spirit visitations and all that sort of thing. I haven't seen any, unless "he" IS the spirit visitation. "If you could talk, bud," I say, leaning in the doorway eating an apple, "I imagine you could say a lot. Or not," I amend.

"What are you talking to yourself about?" It is Dana Scully, and I loop my free arm around her waist.

"Nothing, sweetheart. This bird, that's all. Wondering what he's all about."

"I think it must be just a coincidence about the newspaper and the nodding head. I mean, he hasn't said anything, you know, verbally or anything like that," she says, ever the skeptic.

"Coincidence, my ass. I've got a call in to my source at the Bureau for information about this kind of thing. Birds, peregrines, psychopomps. I tried calling the local library but the librarian was less than helpful. Said neither she nor her institution would have anything to do with the kind of black witchcraft I was asking about."

Dana snorts, her Yoo-Hoo going up her nose. "Ooops...sorry!" she says, and then laughs again. "This is Mormon country, you know. These people are fundamentalists, of a sort."

"Of a sort," I agree. "They fundamentally have their heads up their collective asses."

She bursts into giggles again. This is one of the many things I love about Dana Scully: her sense of humor. That and her courage have seen her through many a dark day. Now she looks at the bird, this ominous portent, this harbinger of doom...Splat! Birdie poop lands on the asphalt near us, and that sets her off again.

"Have you been prescribing happy pills for yourself, my love?" I ask her, hugging her close with one hand while I smoke with the other. She is so soft, so warm, so compliant. Ah!...Just wait'll tonight, Dana!

"No," she says, "I just find this whole thing faintly ridiculous." The phone rings, and I excuse myself to go answer it, squashing the Morley out on the asphalt. It is my Bureau source, Keith Emerson.

"Well," he says, "on the subject of birds as psychopomps, yes, you're absolutely correct, although they usually take the form of, say, sparrows, crows, ravens. On the subject of peregrine falcons, 'peregrine' means 'traveler' or 'wanderer,' so in a sense this creature would be well-suited to the role of announcer of a wandering spirit. On the subject of the supernatural import of this particular bird, I'm afraid I can't speak to that. All I can do is to tell you he's behaving oddly for a wild bird."

"Agent Doggett said that maybe he's a released pet, and that that's why he wants to hang around humans."

"Agent Doggett could be right. You said in your message that the bird seems to be attempting to communicate with you?"

"Yes, the newspaper clipping, etc."

"Well, some birds, particular the pscittacines, of course, the parrot birds, are extremely bright, even rivaling say the chimp or gorilla. The raptors are far from stupid but it isn't known whether they're as intelligent; you could have a trained one there, an escapee from a wild bird show in Marine World, something like that. I wouldn't rule it out. If you could capture it - you'd need a baited trap, and even then the outcome would be doubtful -you could have it sent here for examination."

"Oh, somehow," I say, glancing up at the falcon in the cottonwood tree, "I doubt whether this one'd fall for a trap, no matter how well-baited."

"Well, keep me informed."

"Oh I will," I say, and hang up.

"What'd he say?" Scully asks, when I come out again, squinting my eyes against the bright sun.

"He said," I say, sticking a Morley between my lips, "that it could be a trained bird, one that's escaped from Marine World; other than that, he doesn't know any more than we do."

"Do you think maybe it's hungry and/or thirsty?" she asks, indicating the falcon.

"Could be," I say, "though he didn't act like it earlier. Tell you what, let's fill the ice bucket with water, get some steak or something from the restaurant and put it out on a tray for him."

"Sounds like a good idea." She hesitates. "Um, don't they eat little wild things? Rodents, fish?"

"They are a sea bird kind of falcon, aren't they? We'll see whether they have any fish."

We obtain a platter of fish 'n' chips for the bird and set it under the cottonwood tree with the ice bucket full of cold water. The falcon says, "Scrreek," and swoops down to the food, wolfing it down hungrily.

"He was starved, poor thing," Dana says, and she starts to cry. Poor dear, she is so soft-hearted toward anything lost or helpless. I hold her close. "It's hormones," she sniffs, and suddenly the front of her shirt is wet.

"I'll help you out," I say, and I do.

************************************************************************

"I'm impressed with it," I say, looking at Krycek's rooftop solar array. "It seems to function really well, Alex. How about when the sun's not shining?"

"How about it? The sun shines all the time during the day, Mulder, whether we see that golden light we think of as sunshine or not. No, the power isn't as strong or consistent as it is when the sun's 'shining', but it's sufficient. We just have half a dozen appliances, at the most. And we do have the windmill for backup. We can store that power to be able to use it when the wind is dead calm."

"How come you don't have propane?" I ask stupidly.

"Duh, Mulder," he says patiently. "Propane means propane tanks. How the fuck are you going to get one of those up here?"

"Oh," I say. "Anyway, this is all really terrific, Alex. Did you inherit this house too?"

He turns to me, his emerald eyes glinting. "I did. I own it free and clear."

"He must have really cared for you," I say. "There were some who thought he regarded you as a son."

He snorts. "Well, obviously I'm an heir, but it's not because of my filial devotion."

"Um," I say, "so it's because of the way you fucked?"

He laughs. "Mulder...Yeah," he concludes, twitching his eyebrows.

"I can see why," I say. "You're delectable, Alex."

"Even with a missing arm?"

"Even more, BECAUSE of the missing arm," I say, and put my arms around him tenderly. "Alex, it's not possible for me to love you more than I do, and that is ... well, I want to give you the moon and stars. I want to stay with you till you lose every tooth in your head and poop in your drawers."

He bursts out laughing. "You're funny, Mulder! But thank you!"

"You're very welcome. Is that bird back?" I ask, scanning the bright sky for a circling speck. Yes. It is, or something dead like it.

"No," Krycek asserts. "That's a red-tailed hawk. On the hunt. It found a mouse or rabbit or something." We watch as the hawk dives, makes contact with something on the ground and swoops upward. "Got it," my lover says, unnecessarily. A cloud shadow passes across the sun and I shiver. "Are you cold?" Krycek asks. "I could get you a sweater."

"No," I say, "just contemplating the predator-prey relationship in the great scheme of ecology and...other things." It is no accident, I think, that the apparition has taken the form of a mighty bird of prey.

************************************************************************

"Do you think Perry is happy, just sitting in that tree?" I ask, looking at the falcon. We've started calling him/her that for want of a better name, and he doesn't seem to object to it.

"I dunno," says Monica Reyes, shrugging and lighting a cigarette. She sure does smoke a lot, I think. Surprising us both, the bird swoops into the room. We run after it to find it shredding newspapers again.

"What are you doing?" I ask. The falcon ignores me and picks up a piece of paper in his beak and carries it to the bed, depositing it there. He does this three more times. "What is he-" I say and Monica and I advance on the bed. There are four scraps of newspaper there, each containing one word, and they form a complete sentence: "You bore my child."

I have only fainted once before, and I am fighting against it now, against the sickening rush of dizziness and disorientation spiraling off into darkness. When I come to, Monica and Agent Doggett are bending over me, fanning me with a rental-car brochure. "Wh-What?" I ask. "What happened?"

"You fainted, dear," says Monica. "You'll be fine."

"Why did I faint? I just don't do that!" I see her and Doggett exchange glances. "You won't tell me-Oh!" suddenly it rushes back to me, and I get up, run to the bathroom and vomit. "No," I say between heaves, "no, no, no!" Monica helps me back up, washes my face. "You poor thing. You've had a shock."

"I'll say she has," says Agent Doggett. "I don't...I still don't believe it! A writing bird!"

"Yeah, well, that isn't the significant part of it, John, and you know it."

"What, I'm supposed to believe some old dead guy was reincarnated as a falcon? Come on, Monica, that's pushing it. Where's the bird now?" he says suddenly.

They run outside to see that he's still sitting in his cottonwood. "Out on a limb," Reyes says.

"Out of your TREE." Says Doggett impressively.

Thinking about the situation, I find I have to hurl again, so I heave until nothing comes up but spit. It can't be, I think, it can't be. This must be some horrible practical joke, a conjurer's trick, perhaps, done with smoke and mirrors. I stagger outside and sag against Reyes, who holds me up. "Sweetheart, you should maybe go inside and lie down."

"We'll keep the bird out," adds Doggett.

"It's not a bird," I say quietly. "I mean, it is, but it's possessed, and the spirit possessing it was once the man who was, is, whatever, the father of my child."

Reyes looks at me keenly, evaluatively. "You're right," she says at last. "I agree with you."

Doggett throws up his hands. "I'm going to get Thorazine for both of you!"

Reyes shakes her head. "No, John, it's real. Uncanny, but real. This here," she adds, affecting a cowgirl accent, "is a gen-you-wine X-Fahl."

I laugh. "It is, isn't it? Are you going to call Kersh, Agent Doggett?"

"No," he says, "not yet," and looks speculatively at the bird, who looks back and grooms a feather back into place.

"I hate it," I say quietly, and the two agents turn to look at me.

"Time for you to go to bed," says Reyes firmly, and helps me back into the room, pulling off jeans and T-shirt and putting me to bed.

"But it's the middle of the day!" I protest.

"You've just gotten over fainting and vomiting with shock and terror, and you should be flat on your back about now." She gives my shoulder a final squeeze and goes outside to talk to Doggett. I am left alone with my thoughts, and they are not pleasant ones. I hear whimpering in the room, and don't realize at first that I am making those noises. Suddenly, though, the floodgates are opened and I sob and wail and pound the pillow. Doggett and Reyes come back in a hurry. "Sweetheart," my lover says, taking me tenderly into her arms, "what's the matter?"

"Oh, you know what the matter is!" I cry. "I'm being haunted and the ghost is Will's father! He was or is a monster and he can't, can't CAN'T be the father of my child! I want the father to be Mulder! I love Mulder, I love him and I want him back!"

"Well, look, Dana," Monica says, rocking me, "as we've discussed earlier, either way, it's his genes, right? And that's all it is. Donated genetic material. And only a genetic test can prove paternity one way or the other."

"Then I want to have one done," I say, suddenly calmer, sitting up and rubbing my swollen eyes. "That man raped me, Monica. He knocked me out and took advantage of me."

"But Dana, Dana. The baby is perfectly innocent, and perfectly lovable, no matter his parentage. You have to focus on that; that's what matters."

"I want to call Leona now," I say.

************************************************************************

Whenever Krycek ventures outside, he takes his assault rifle with him, as if to fend off an advancing army, or perhaps to perform a drive-by shooting. It's the falcon that's literally preying on his mind, I know, but he won't talk about it. Once or twice I hear the weapon discharge, and wonder who or what he's shot, but he always comes back inside with a face like a thundercloud, having hit nothing. "You can't shoot that bird, Alex, he's endangered," I say once, mildly, and he turns on me fiercely.

"I'll say he's endangered! I'm endangering him!" God, Alex, chill, I think, but say nothing.

He arrives back from one of his sorties in the middle of the night, looking guilty.

"What is it?" I ask sleepily.

"Oh," he says, "nothing. I hope you like duck, is all." He chucks the Kalashnikov in the closet and climbs into bed, Siobhan jumping up and burrowing between us. "You crap in the bed, you're history, bitch," he says, but pulls her ear affectionately.

It is a long night. I cannot sleep; my mind keeps wandering, walking the endless dark trails of the high country.

In the morning, I wake to see that there is no peregrine falcon, thank God; that Krycek has fixed me French toast, and that I am hungry. "He never came back!" he exclaims. "Guess he pretty much realized he was toast if he did." I'm not about to argue, and anyway figure it's something that can't be determined one way or the other; so I eat my breakfast and smile. It is when he upsets the bowl of egg goop all over the stove, the counter and the floor that I go to him as he kneels, wiping furiously but ineffectually with an outdated sponge, and touch his arm.

"Alex, it's OK. It's OK, Alex." He looks at me and his clear-beryl eyes are glistening, and then he does a surprising thing: he leans against me and starts to cry, literally, on my shoulder. So I'm sitting in a pool of French toast batter, while my lover weeps and wails and I try to comfort him in my clumsy way. "Alex, you haven't slept," I say, sweeping the two-toned hair back from his forehead and kissing the tip of his fine little nose. "Darling, take a Valium, chill, and I'll hold you." We end up seated on a wicker loveseat, looking out over the valley, and I'm talking to him softly and kissing him more softly still. The Valium has done its job and he's lost that crazed, frightened look; he even yawns.

"Well, if I'm boring you," I kid.

"Not even," he says, "I'm just relaxing. Mulder?"

"Yes?"

"If you'd suck me off I'd be really relaxed. Really REALLY relaxed!"

"Just what I had in mind, myself," I say, unsnapping his shorts. I pull out his rapidly-stiffening cock and kiss it. "You taste so yummy, Alex," I murmur.

"Didn't your Mama teach you not to talk with your mouth full?"

"OK, can I sing with my mouth full?"

"Depends. Let's hear it."

"Mmmm," I hum, setting up a vibration that makes him groan. I take my time about sucking him: now the shapely tip, leaking pre-come; down the veined and throbbing shaft to his balls which I hold carefully in my mouth, running my tongue along the ridged skin. Krycek moans and it is all he can do to lie still. The delicate confluence of lips and tongue and sensitive man-flesh swims to the back, the primitive part of my brain, as I abandon myself to sensation and need and then he is crying out my name and coming in my mouth. I am so aroused that I come too, gasping and shuddering. "So much for these jeans," I say ruefully, unzipping them. "Good thing you have a washer and dryer, Alex."

He grins. "It's one luxury a faggot can't do without. That, and hot showers and a Cuisinart."

"You have a Cuisinart here?"

"Just kidding. But I do have a blender. Ask me to fix you some of my killer Margaritas sometime."

"I will," I say, straddling him, rubbing my damp sticky cock against his.

"Oh!" he says, and is hard again. "Fuck me, Mulder," he says. "I need to be taken, filled."

"Gladly!" I say. Krycek turns over and looks back over his shoulder.

"Mulder! Now!"

I bend over him, sliding a finger I've licked up him, then a second and finally a third. With the introduction of each, he moans and shivers. Then it is time for the Big Guy. "Comin' in," I say and then oooh! He's so tight and he holds me in such a powerful grip, massaging my aching cock, as I slide it slowly in, first the head, then lower and finally all the way to the root.

"Mulder, Mulder!" says Krycek, shoving back. "Fuck me harder!"

"Do you like this, getting fucked in the ass by my big dick?" I ask him, shoving hard into him, that wonderful, perfect ass giving me all the pleasure in the world; and he is groaning his assent.

"Touch me, Mulder," he says, and I grasp his hot hard cock and stroke it; and then his groans become incoherent cries and he is spurting all over my hand. Something pops in my brain with the sound of a twig snapping, a green and young and living sound, made by the breakage of this branchlet from the largest tree in the universe, a tree that is dipping and swaying in a strong hot wind, and the wind blows over me and through me, and I come explosively, screaming, "ALEX!" After the convulsion has passed I find I want to fuck some more, so I push into him again, and again, and I come, sharply, piercingly, almost to the point of pain; and so, incredibly, does he.

"Mulder," he says, "it gets better every time. But I wanna fuck more."

"OK, babe, then stand up, when you're able to." He does and I push him into a corner, where he stands quivering, not looking back, facing the wall, studying it as though it held the answer to the one question he always wants to ask: can this go on forever. I part his hard thighs and ass and position my cock, which is wet with lube and spit and come, against the tight ring of muscle. Oh, it is so sweet, the anticipation of fucking him, then the feel of his tight rectal walls wrapping themselves around me, holding me in the most loving embrace imaginable as I slide s-l-o-w-l-y in, then out, then "AH!" I scream and Krycek groans and stiffens against me and comes all over himself.

That should be enough for anyone, I think, but it isn't: he declares himself insatiable, and that he wants to be "fucked to death." Yes, I agree, it would be a great way to go. I lay him back down on the bed and fuck him face-to-face, his legs spread wide for me, his feet on my shoulders, his beautiful lips parted for my kisses, the great emerald eyes half-veiled by sultry lids and thick black lashes, and oh, Alex, you're so tight, so warm, so gorgeous; your skin is so soft, your tongue so skilled, now imperious, now yielding to mine, and I come again, and the moment is transcendent, beyond anything I've yet experienced. Krycek looks into my eyes and comes, shooting so hard he hits himself on the chin. Afterward, we neck and nuzzle and reminisce.

************************************************************************

The falcon's lunch is a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner, sans bones: the main course, mashed potatoes, beans, biscuits; and he tears into it, eating with gusto. "Sorry it's not the Ritz. I know that's what you're used to," I say, apologetically, and it looks up, gazing at me calmly, fixing me with first one eye, then the other. I sigh. "Are you ever going to lead us to Mulder and Krycek?"

"Screek," the falcon says, preening.

"Yeah, yeah," I say, shaking a Morley out of an open pack, and sticking it between my lips. The bird drops his biscuit, flaps over and makes a jab at my face. "Hey!" I say in alarm, putting up a hand to ward him off, but it is just the cigarette he's after. Now it is in his talons and he is shredding it. I double over with laughter. "OK, dude," I say, "I won't smoke in your holy presence." They do say reformed smokers are the worst critics.

"Squuck," says the falcon, resettling his pinions.

My love Dana Scully shows her pretty little face, swollen from tears, at the door. "It's still here," she says flatly, looking at the peregrine.

"Yes, he is," I nod. "You know, Dana, I believe he means you no harm."

"I don't care," she says dully. "My baby-oh, my baby! Mine and Mulder's! MULDER'S!"

"I know," I say, and hug her.

"I'm going to have the tests done."

"Oh. Dana, please don't do that - it'll end up really upsetting you, worse than you already have been," I say, but she insists on calling Leona, giving her instructions on calling a nurse to get the blood drawn. "They've got blood samples from him in D.C.," she says grimly. "If there is paternity, it will show in the comparisons they do."

I nod silently, thinking, you poor thing, but saying, "Remember, Dana, number one, his genes will show up anyway, since he's at least a grandparent, and number two, it really doesn't matter who the father is."

"Yes, it does. I want it to be the man I love."

"Who's shtupping another man even as we speak." There, I've said it, the Bad Thing, to Dana Scully.

"I don't care," she says stubbornly. "I love him and I want him back. Whatever he's done. I'll forgive him."

"Yes," I say, a little sadly, "I know."

************************************************************************

The falcon announces his presence this evening by appearing silently in the open kitchen window. "Fuck!" Krycek swears, "I'm gonna get him this time!" and he stomps off, running back with his AK-47, which he sights, aims and cocks. The great raptor flies away, wings beating in the still air, and the spray of bullets misses him entirely.

"Nice going, Alex!" I say angrily. "He wasn't doing any harm!"

"He was here, wasn't he?"

************************************************************************

At ten PM I'm awakened by the sound of tapping at the door. "Quoth the raven," I say, in a thick sleepy voice, and answer the knock. It's the damned bird, of course. "What do you want?" I ask, arms crossed. The peregrine flaps over to a copy of Gone with the Wind lying on a table. "Hey-don't!" I say, but it tears and rips several pages with powerful beak and talons into small shreds of paper, just as before. It then carries these to my bed and assembles them.

Monica Reyes is awake now, watching the falcon raptly. The bird backs up and says, "Screek." We look at the assemblage. The message reads: "Follow me to M and K. Now." I look at Reyes and she raises her eyebrows.

"We'll get John," she says. A few minutes later Doggett appears, wearing a jacket over his PJ top.

"So," he says, shaking his head like he's got a bee in it, "the bird says 'follow me. Now!' And so of course we follow the damned bird. This isn't making a whole lot of sense. I mean, what's wrong with this picture?"

"Stop being so left-brained, John," Monica chides. "It makes plenty of sense if you look at it intuitively. The falcon heralds the emergence of the supernatural."

"And the 'supernatural' is the Smoking Man himself, living on in this bird," Doggett says disgustedly, kicking at a gum wrapper. "And we're further to believe that he's on our side for a change, God knows why. And now he's dragged us out of bed in the middle of the night, when we should all be getting our beauty sleep, and God knows I need it, and we're going off on some wild goose chase trying to find Mulder and Krycek when we won't even be able to find our own asses in the dark."

Reyes dimples. "Does anyone have a flashlight?"

************************************************************************

"This is bullshit!" Johansen says sullenly as we slog our way up the sodden trail, all of us carrying backpacks which contain supplies necessary for survival, should we need them, but which impede us, slow us even further than the fierce and sudden storm is doing.

Yeah, so's your mama, Johansen, you lame monkey-spanking excuse for an FBI agent, I think, but continue walking, or rather sloshing my way without speaking and risking a verbal altercation, three feet behind Dana Scully, a watchful eye out for slips. She's tripped once, about 2 miles south of where we are now, and fallen on the gooshy-hard and unforgiving trail, emerging from her mud bath soaked and miserable, and has some scrapes, too, to show for it; but she is quite the trooper and never once complains. We are following the falcon: it flies the length of half a city block ahead and calls to us until we've caught up to it; then it flies on again. In this manner we make our slow and more-than-damp way into the heart of the Uintahs.

At around midnight the rainclouds I've been watching warily begin to regroup and blot out the stars, and at 1 AM, all hell breaks loose, the rain sluicing down, the sky flashing blue-white in the night, dazzling and everywhere at once. "Great timing!" Doggett mutters. "How can it fly in this?"

"Screek," comes from somewhere nearby and our flashlights pick out the bedraggled form of the wet falcon, sitting in a fir tree while lightning flashes and thunder booms all around us. There is a great ripping noise and jagged white-hot light dazzles us; there is a crack and the tree splits open.

The rain begins to pour down in torrents and we can't see the path ahead of us, let alone the bird. Soon we are more than soaked; we are streaming water and the way is nearly unnavigable. Agent Young, using his infrared specs to search for the peregrine, leans too far over the side of the trail, misses his footing, falls over the edge and begins a precipitous slide to the bottom. We peer over the edge of the trail, and Doggett and Thornton slither over the side. From below, we hear crashes and curses, Agent Young's Mormon beliefs notwithstanding.

About 50 feet down we find him, clinging to a jutting pine tree and trying to wedge himself against a rock. "My ring," he gasps, "My wedding ring!" Climbing down closer, we see what he is babbling about: his ring is indeed caught near the terminus of a small branch. That finger must hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, let alone whatever other injuries he's sustained. Doggett pulls out a knife and begins sawing gamely but ineffectually at the branch, with his left hand.

"John," I say, and take it gently from him. As I work away at the branch, cold water runs down my already sopping wet hair onto my face and down my back, and I can feel a sneeze coming on.

The great raptor narrowly missed the lightning strike, but was close enough to sustain singed pinfeathers and to be thrown a hundred yards through the air. As it righted itself, it felt the consciousness of the Other, the scary, uncanny and overweening man-thing, loose its grasp from its mind and fall away. "I'm free!" it said jubilantly to itself, in falcon-speech. Gone was the oppressive presence and it returned in thought to a bird, a mortal creature with sodden feathers who needed shelter from the storm.

"Where's the bird?" Dana asks, when everyone is assembled again. Oh, we are a sorry group: soaked through, chilled to the bone, smeared with mud, scratched, bruised and shivering. "He deserted us," she says clearly. "And it just figures, doesn't it? He's probably sitting up there," she indicates with a wide arm the surrounding peaks, "laughing his head off at us."

"You don't know that," I say. "He was awfully close to that lightning strike. A million volts - SST! Fried falcon."

"Think he bought the farm, then?" asked Doggett, knowing the answer. "Now how do I write this up? What kind of report am I going to be able to make?"

I am itching for a cigarette, and before I know it I am grubbing in my backpack, which is internally still pretty dry, thank God, and I find a pack of Morleys; then one is in my hand. "You might," I say, lighting it, "not even mention it at all, John."

"Then how can I justify what we've been doing the past couple of days?"

I shrug. "You'll think of something. If you don't, and if it's just a matter of 'creative accounting', I think I'll be able to help you out there." I catch up with Dana Scully on the way back down the slick, dark trail.

"He's just up to his old tricks," she says darkly. "Luring us out here in the storm, no light but our flashlights, no moon even, trying to get us killed."

I sigh and put an arm around her. "Dana, you have to believe that whatever happened out here was for the best. Take it on faith," I add, touching the tiny gold cross at her throat.

"Best for whom?" she asks challengingly. "For whom, Monica?"

************************************************************************

"Notice anything different?" asks a beaming Krycek over the breakfast table. "I dunno," I say sleepily, trying not to yawn. That storm, and the spooky way Krycek crept about the house with his Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, had kept me up half the night, turning over and over in bed, like a dog trying to get settled. "Um, really good scrambled powdered-eggs Benedict substitute, Alex."

"No need for sarcasm," Krycek says, picking up the yipping Siobhan and placing her on his lap.

"I'm not."

"Well, are you going to guess? Guess what's different?"

"Fuck, I dunno. Did 'he make all things new'?"

"You're cruisin', bud," Krycek says, abstractedly pulling on a puppy ear.

"OK, I give up. What?" I am not typically grouchy, but after a sleepless night, made so by a madman who kept shaking me awake and hissing, "Do you see him? Do you see him?" I am WILLING TO TRY.

"This," Krycek says, setting Siobhan down and striding to the open window. "This!"

"What? A huge rainbow?"

"NO BIRD."

"Oh," I say, scratching my neck; I need a haircut badly. "That's good, I guess, huh?"

He rolls his great expressive eyes. "Good? It's fuckin' GREAT! I finally got rid of the old bastard!"

"Alex, remember what I said? You can't kill a ghost. You know that."

"Somebody did, though. Somebody killed it," he says, with a fever-glint in his emerald eyes.

************************************************************************

It is 10 AM but I am reluctant to wake Dana. She needs the sleep badly, and how peaceful she looks in repose, the tender lips, the porcelain skin with just a few pale freckles across the bridge of the aristocratic nose, an expression of such childlike innocence it is appalling to think of what I must tell her, for it will wound her deeply; and her gentle soul, mirrored in her fine face. The phone rings, shattering the stillness, and I go quickly to answer it; it is too late, she is waking; I can hear her yawning and the subtle sounds of crepitation as she stretches and she is making such sexy little noises that it is all I can do not to unceremoniously hang up the phone and pounce on her.

"John," I whisper. "The lab called with the results of the baby's blood test. Mm-hm, not good. Uh-uh. I don't know!" and I replace the receiver carefully in its cradle just as Dana walks up behind me, putting her arms around my waist.

"What don't you know?" she asks, smiling a sleepy smile.

"Nothing," I lie.

Over breakfast at the motel restaurant, toast and jam for her, a Grand Slam for me, I feel Doggett's eyes on me. "John," I say, "what's up?"

His face is grave, concerned. "I heard from Kersh a few minutes ago."

"And?"

"And he's ordering the investigation off. Says it's been a terrible waste of man-hours, money and other resources. Murder will out, he says; that it's just a matter of time before one or the other of our miscreants shows up in a populated area, say Provo or Salt Lake; that's if they're still alive; and they can be apprehended then."

"Really?" Dana snorts. "By whom? Will the ghost of the Smoking Man pull a gun on them?"

************************************************************************

It is mid-day, and Krycek is standing next to the flaming barbecue in the broiling hot sun, grilling assorted parts of duck. A mosquito or something bothers him and he swats at it absently with the paintbrush he's using to sauce the duck (the sauce from an "old family recipe," he insists, but I have trouble visualizing Uncle Vanya and Aunt Babushka, in native costume, standing at a Weber and drinking vodka). This leaves a red-brown splotch on his neck. Coming up softly behind him, I turn his head and lick off the spot.

"I always wondered what it would be like."

"What, being a vampire?"

"No, sweetie," I say, arms around his beautiful pectorals, "smearing something hot...and sticky...and gooey all over you and slurping it up."

"At this rate, you'll have your wish," he says, slapping at another 'skeeter.

"Don't we have repellent?"

"I dunno."

"I'm pretty repellent," I say, grinning. "Try me!"

"Mulder, how can the world's sexiest man be repellent?"

"YOU'RE the world's sexiest man!" I grab the paintbrush, dip it in the barbecue sauce and tap him solemnly on each shoulder. "I dub thee Sir Alexei, Knight of the Groaning Board."

"Yeah? Well, I name you Superman, Lord of the Flies," and he draws an "S" on my T-shirt and dabs my crotch with the brush. I make a lunge for the brush and then we are rolling over and over in the wild grasses, laughing our heads off. Then he stops. "Roll over, Mulder," he says, "and I'll do you."

"Ah," I say, "done is certainly better than undone! Or underdone," I add, thinking of the duck. I feel a hard sharp metal something pressed against the small of my back. "Hey-" I say, but the damage is done; he's slit my shorts down the back from waist to crotch, and I feel a strong hand cupping my ass, parting it, exploring. All at once I am hot and hard and I know he is, too.

He leans over me and then the knife is at my throat. "Just wanna see you squirm some, Mulder," he says.

"Um," I say, "careful with that, Alex!"

He laughs and the knife is withdrawn, then I feel him settle, move into place astride my hips, his hard thighs squeezing mine, his cock bumping against my ass. "Now," he says, and slides in. "No lube," he says, unnecessarily.

"No kidding!" I gasp.

"It's better this way, Mulder. More friction, better, harder orgasm."

"Better for you, maybe," I say, but my God it does feel good: I can feel every ridge, every vein of that beautiful cock of his, and I want him to fuck me forever.

"Did I give you permission to talk?" he asks, threading his fingers through my hair and forcing my head back. The knife glides against the hollow of my throat. I feel a stinging sensation and a trickle of moisture working its way down my neck.

"You cut me!" I say, outraged.

"Yes," he whispers, "isn't it delicious?" and he leans forward to lick up the blood. Feeling the silken touch of his lips and tongue on my neck, I tense up, all the muscles in my groin bunching and clenching, and when I release I scream my joy into the sunshine as I come with excruciating pleasure into the dirt. I hear and feel Krycek's climax close behind mine, and he is riding me hard and yelling with abandon, and I come again.

"God, Alex," I say, rolling over in the sweet-scented meadow grass, "That was so good! Where'd you learn how to do that?"

"Oh, Mulder," he says, tickling my chin with a long bearded blade of grass, "I just ad-lib."

************************************************************************

Dana Scully's Diary: "Well, I went and did it. I HAD TO ASK. And when I did, Monica told me, quietly and truthfully. I am not a histrionic woman, but this would give the fits to a saint."

"NO!" I scream, then "no," much more softly, and - I can almost hear the creeeek of the faucets opening - and the waterworks are engaged, the hot tears forming immediately and irrevocably in the corners of my stinging eyes, then, with the first convulsive sob, spilling over and running down my face. "No, Monica, no! What'll I do? What'll I tell Mulder, when I see him? What'll I ever tell Will?"

The strong woman at my side holds me firmly, a tight embrace meant to comfort and support. "You'll tell them what you need to, when the time comes. You know, Dana, Mulder, if we ever get him back, will be just as thrilled to have a baby brother, maybe more so, since he'll have to worry less about the upbringing. You know how men are. And little Will doesn't care who his daddy is. He's got lots of people who will love him, care for him; he's growing up in a kind of kibbutz; everyone's his daddy. Last I talked to Leona, the guards have all fallen in love with William and fight over feeding and diapering him."

"But I... I hate the thought of that... he... touched me. And got me pregnant. My mortal enemy!"

"Dana, he's dead. And the way he behaved as that falcon wasn't at all consistent with an enemy. And he...well, he fucked you, evidently, sorry to be so blunt; but it was because," she says, stroking my hair, "he liked you. A lot. So much that he wanted you and only you to be the mother of his child."

I look at her, crying momentarily forgotten. "Why?"

She laughs. "Dana, Dana," she says, shaking her head, "I need a cigarette." Sticking a Morley between her pretty lips, lighting and inhaling it, she resumes. "It's like this, dear. You're super-bright and incredibly beautiful and sexy and sophisticated and brave and sweet and good, and that's just for starters."

"Oh," I say, and can feel the blush starting at my chin, perhaps, rapidly creeping upwards. "Well." I think about the situation for a moment. I hate the man like poison, I hate even worse the thought of being date-raped, but I got the most beautiful, wonderful baby out of it, I who had been told and convinced I could never conceive again and who wanted a child more than anything in the world. And my head is sore from crying and thinking and maybe I will think about this tomorrow.

Dana Scully's Diary: "We meet Leona, carrying Will in a Snugli baby carrier, at the Salt Lake City airport. The girl looks as fresh and perky as I don't feel. I hug her awkwardly and take the baby, who coos and blows a bubble. 'Yes, it's Mommy,' I say. 'How's my widow baby boysie?'

The flight back is uneventful, a nice counterpoint, or a serious letdown, however one wants to view it, to the spooky events of the weeks preceding it. Twice I unbutton my blouse to feed William, twice the middle-aged woman two seats over looks askance at me (as though I were doing something indecent) as I take out my breast for the baby to suckle, and twice Monica Reyes glares at her, daring her in a fierce silent way to offer a word of protest. She is a wonderful protectress, Monica, a great friend and an angelic lover, and I am overjoyed to have her in my life. Still, my thoughts turn often to Mulder. My Mulder. If I ever catch up to him, if I ever see him again, speak to him again, what then will I have to say to him, and him to me? The news that he is a brother and not a father will not bother him overmuch, I am sure; but what about the other thing: when I look into his Kingman-turquoise eyes will I see my heart reflected there? Or will he be mirroring someone else's love? I think I know the answer, and I must put the thought aside before it takes root and burgeons forth in the evil flower of nightmare."

"Mrs. Scully? Mrs. Scully?" It is a voice, intruding in a welcome way on my musings, which have taken a dark turn; it is like the slap of fresh water diving into a clear lake; and it belongs to a sweet uncomplicated girl, whom I can't teach to call me "Ms. Scully," or "Dana," to whom I owe a lot, and whose open eager face looks and asks a question.

"Yes?"

"Um, I was going to volunteer to take Will for a while so that you could have some rest. You didn't find his father," she added, all in the same breath.

I can feel my jaw muscles clenching and hardening. At this rate I'll have TMJ before this hopeless and pointless junket is finally over, before we arrive back in D.C., dejected, defeated.

Monica Reyes turns slightly around in her seat. "Leona, you know how you could make yourself useful? Go excavate the stewardess out of First Class. The Mrs. needs a Coke."

I look at her and giggle. "The 'Missus'?"

"Yep."

"I suppose that means you're the Mister?"

"Yep," she affirms. "Go on, Leona, we'll be in Dulles before that stew comes back to Coach."

************************************************************************

We sit at the outdoors table under an umbrella and feast on duck parts, some of them identifiable and none, thankfully, burned, along with instant mashed potatoes (made with powdered milk), canned beans and Jello made with wild blackberries Krycek gathered early this morning. "You know," says Krycek, "we really need supplies. We have practically no fresh stuff, other than what I can shoot and forage."

"Does this mean we have to go into town?" I ask, worried.

"Yeah," he says, licking his thumb. "Last I checked, PeaPod doesn't stop here."

I sigh, forking mashed potatoes. "It's a terrible risk, Alex."

"Well, what isn't? Life is a big risk. You risk dying, you know? Anyway, I think you'll find our trail has gone cold."

"Why do you say so? What if, right now, they're flying overhead and they see the smoke from the barbecue?"

He gestures upward. "See anything up there? We haven't been buzzed for a week. They've given up pursuit, trust me."

I nod reluctantly. "OK, if you insist."

************************************************************************

On the way to the restroom I pass a pretty young woman wearing sunglasses. She looks somehow familiar. I squat nearby. "Hey, Shades," I say, "you just won't leave us alone, will you? Funny, I'd have thought that along with all the other marvels of bioengineering your people've accomplished you would have by now mastered personal, individual flight, like with feathers or a self-contained jet-propulsion system, and you wouldn't need to travel with the plebes. The humans."

She doesn't flinch or start or look up from her book: The Origin of Species.

"Light reading, huh?" I ask. "Look, the child you seek? Is not this one. I know its parentage and can tell you with absolute certainty that it's 100% human."

This time the woman/replicant looks up at me, resettling her sunglasses on her fine nose. "How can you be so sure?" Her voice sounds rusty, as though seldom-used and in need of oiling, like a creaky old hinge.

"We had the infant genetically tested. The father is...well, he was someone she knew."

"Agent Mulder, you mean?"

"No...look, who it is isn't important."

The replicant/girl folds her arms, placing one perfectly manicured hand bearing a sapphire ring on the opposite arm. I look at those iridescent white fingernails and think of talons.

"It is to us," the replicant is saying. "Please furnish us with a copy of the medical findings."

I stand and look at her for a moment, thinking, I'd be attracted to you if you were human and if I didn't already have the most beautiful woman in the world to love, then walk back to my seat. "Hand me my briefcase, Leona," I say. Opening it, I extract a photocopy of the lab report, which I march back to the alien woman. She scans it quickly, reading it much faster than a person could.

"I will present this to my superiors. They may accept it at face value or they may order further tests."

"Hey," I say, shoving my face in hers, "I don't take orders from you. And the baby is human. You have my personal guarantee. And now, please fuck off."

Re-seating myself, I muse on paternity. The baby's father is/was human, for Christ's sake. Although, come to think of it, that's stretching it. Suddenly I am overwhelmed with a desire to smoke.

************************************************************************

It's decided that we'll stay at Gananian's house on our trip into town. Of course, there is no way of contacting him to warn him of our impending arrival, but he won't mind if we just drop in. The ride down the mountain is the most pleasant we've had so far, relaxed, bantering, the horses taking their time; there is no rush. The birds are singing and the pines are soughing, or whatever it is that pines do. Cantering up the drive toward the good doctor's residence Krycek notices them first: Tigger, the claybank gelding, and Mr. Ed. "Mikhail's here!" he calls to me, jubilantly. Dr. Gananian and two other men are waiting on the porch, and Krycek pulls Al Marac to a sliding stop, slips off him and hurls himself into the arms of his countryman. "Mischa! Mischa!" he cries. "I thought I'd never see you again!"

Krycek and I both look at the other man, young, blond, with a growing-out crew-cut. I'm hoping he doesn't catch Krycek's eye, for he's very nice-looking in a Nazi kind of way. "This is Ken," says Mikhail, "my cellie. I was imprisoned, Alex, for not snitching on you two. We escaped together in that first really bad storm we had. He's good people. Ken, this is Alex, and this is Mulder."

"You like being called by your last name?" the kid asks.

I shrug. "It's all anyone's ever called me since I was a teenager."

We move our operations into the livingroom, and Rosalinda brings chips, salsa and Margaritas, salt and all. Soon the conversation is flowing like the drinks. When it reaches the point at which Dr. Gananian was struck by Doggett during the questioning, I can feel myself becoming really angry. "He hit you! There was no provocation whatever, no justification. You should've pressed charges."

"No," he says, "what would that have accomplished? He would've come down on me twice as hard."

"Wow," I say, "I never knew Doggett was such a hard-ass."

Rosalinda, now serving delectable pina coladas, glances back over her shoulder and says something in Spanish.

"What'd she say?" asks Krycek. He is grinning rather stupidly and is obviously looped.

"It can't be repeated!" laughs Gananian. "Something about Doggett...having intercourse with dogs!"

"Well, you done repeated it," says Krycek, and laughs like a maniac.

"Hey, guys," says the doctor, "I snooped around and found something in the medical database I've got access to, never mind how, on your partner. Dana Scully, right?"

"Yeah, but...?"

He opens a drawer in his antique highboy (It came with the house, he'd explained earlier), opens a heavy drawer full of green Pendaflex files, extracts a Microsoft Access printout and tosses it to me. I take it, bewildered. "A genetic test done on baby Will? Why?"

"Read on," he says, half-smiling, half-serious, steepling his fingers.

"Oh...oh, wow," I exclaim, reading through it quickly.

"What is it?" Krycek asks.

"See for yourself." He takes it.

"Christ. Oh, Christ. The motherfucker lives on. God, I'm sorry, Mulder."

"It's OK," I say serenely. "I now have a baby brother to replace the sister I lost."

"So maybe he was hanging around, like on Earth I mean, to sort of keep an eye on his kid and the mother of his kid?"

Gananian, Chekhov and Ken all look at us uncomprehendingly, and I have to relate the whole fantastic tale to them.

" 'Nother Margarirra. Margrida. Magaritta." I slur, after I, with numerous interruptions by Krycek, finish my tale, which is surprisingly coherent. I just can't get the $500 words quite right. I CAREFULLY leave out the fact that Krycek murdered the old man, and that he tried his level best to kill the falcon. Somehow, I don't think those factoids would sit well with this crowd.

"Extraordinary, if true," says Gananian, leaning back in his chair. I almost want to believe it."

"Oh, you can believe it, all right," says Chekhov quietly. "If Alex and Fox tell you it's true, you can bet it is. They're honest and they don't hallucinate, not so far as I can tell."

Krycek smiles at him.

"So...you experienced a wide range of paranormal phenomena up to and including visitations in the guise of a...hawk?"

"Falcon. Peregrine. Yes."

"Ah," says the doctor. "And why would he be haunting you, Alex? What's his percentage in doing that?"

"Got to pee," Krycek says abruptly and leaves for the bathroom.

"You know," Gananian says, over excellent chile rellenos later that evening, "Mikhail and Ken, you're welcome to stay as long as you like, but if the law is looking for you, they'll surely check back here, knowing that I'm a sympathizer."

"That's a chance we'll have to take," says Chekhov, looking down. "We've got no money and nowhere else to go, at this juncture."

"Stay, then," says Gananian, smiling at him. "Stay. Rosalinda and I will do our level best to make you feel welcome."

*******************************************************************

"Hey, guys, I can do better than that," I say. Will, lying peacefully asleep in his mother's arms, wakes up and begins to scream. We take him to a restroom, thankfully, one with a changing station ... for he is wet; and I tell them about our footpad. "So you told her the baby's human? Will she believe in the veracity of the report? You could've faked that and she knows it."

"I know," I say. "That's why I think that she and others like her will be hanging around for some time to come."

"Yeah," she says, slipping the Pampers over the grunting and squirming Will. "Why can't we just...you know, terminate them, get rid of them?"

"Dana, you know the reason why not," I say, tickling the baby to hear him gurgle. "They can't be killed by any conventional means. In fact, I really don't know if they can be killed at all." She nods, pulling up Will's sleeper and patting him lovingly.

"Let's blow," I say, "we can catch up to the others later. I need a smoke." Out on the tarmac while we await the shuttle which will take us to our rental car, we stand, uncomfortable in the muggy, cloying heat due to the sweaters we wore on the plane; and I smoke. And smoke.

"This car'd better have A/C," Dana grumbles. "The air was on the blink in the last one I had." Yes, I think, and we mind this all-of-a-sudden moist heat so very much worse than the dry desert, no matter what the thermometer says.

We don't go back immediately to Dana's house, which is probably being watched by Shades and her pals; we drive to mine instead. "I have extra bedrooms and baths, you two; you can each have a room to yourself." Dana Scully looks at me and smiles. "I'd like to share with you, if you don't mind."

"Leona, please get the baby some juice. There's some apple juice that hasn't been opened. In the fridge."

Dana sinks into a deep old velvet-upholstered chair and I sit, squeezing my hips in between hers and the chair frame. I'm taller and bigger-boned than she is and take up more room, so I sit carefully. Leona comes back in after feeding Will the apple juice. At first she looks just a trifle askance at us, though she is much too polite to say anything. She comes, I remind myself, from an anti-gay culture, one which promotes above all else the sanctity of the traditional nuclear family, sex for procreation only, and the naivete, unworldliness, delicacy, extreme femininity of its women; and so the sight of two lesbians hugging and kissing in her new digs must give her pause, to say the least. But then, I think, looping a friendly arm around my love's tiny, tiny waist, Dana really isn't 100% gay anyway. Just now she's gotten that puzzled abstracted look that puckers her pretty face like a sour lemon, and I know what she's thinking of, or rather whom: Fox Mulder. If I were able to crawl inside her head to study her thought processes, this is what I'd find, were I able to make sense of the riotous flashes of her neural impulses:

"Mulder left me. For another man. Mulder doesn't love me. He isn't even the father of my child, so I don't even have that from him. The real father of my child was, and maybe still is, somewhere, a monster, a bully, a villain. He is dead, true, and barring some other strange, preternatural incarnation, will remain dead; yet he lives on in the lovely and innocent form of my baby. When I look into Will's eyes, whom do I see looking back at me? Blink, blink, orb in orbit, gazing bluely on a new world, as fresh and sweet as he, so far is he from the stained and toxic heart of the schemer, killer, destroyer, the very Devil on Earth."

Her eyes have become very wide and glazey and I pass my hand in front of her face.

"Hey," she says, smiling faintly, "I'm aware of you, Monica. I was just thinking."

"About what?"

"Oh, something that Mulder said a few years back, about 'the inextricable relationships in our lives that are neither accidental nor somehow under our control.' He was referring to Krycek, who'd come by and re-convinced Mulder that the aliens were real. I was so pissed! I was happy that he was a believer once again, yet angry, because everyone, including me and A.D. Skinner, God rest his soul, had tried to show Mulder the error of his ways. Not even my dramatic and heartfelt testimony on what happened on that bridge in Pennsylvania could sway him; yet, all it took was a few words and a smack on the cheek from that animal, that murderer, liar, thief! That miserable, crippled excuse for a human being! How I hated him then, even worse than I ever had before. How envious I was, because I knew it hadn't ended with just a chaste peck, oh no! They'd done the nasty all night, all right, sucking and fucking each other until Mulder was reduced to an insensate glob on the couch."

"Dana," I say, smoothing back a lock of her pretty hair, "Mulder, whatever else he is, is mostly gay. He can't love you the way he can love another man. He's just incapable of it. And it's not your fault, and it's not his fault or even Krycek's fault. It's just one of those things, a quirk of biology. Look at me. Can I help the way I am?"

She looks at me for a long moment. Her troubled gaze sweeps across me; and I am struck by self-doubt. I know that I am a statuesque and attractive woman; some even consider me beautiful; but I am no match for Mulder. I don't have the history with Dana that he has. Also, I don't have a dick.

"No," she finally says, "and thank God for it. Thank God you're the way you are." And kisses me.

************************************************************************

I'm kneeling on the hard shower tiles, hot water is pelting down and I am doing my best to swallow his big cock whole. Mulder comes fast, so it won't be long till he yells and shoots down my throat; but in the meantime, I'm trying to make every nanosecond count, using all my skill to firmly yet delicately suck and lick him till he screams. He is moaning now, and close, very close; his knees are shaking and his hips thrusting spasmodically, driving his hot hard rod deeper into my throat. Just short of his climax, though, I pull away. "Oh God, Alex," he groans, "I'm so close. Please!"

"It makes it hotter, to tease," I respond, lightly tonguing his cock. His hands clench and he grunts and he is READY. I abruptly pull away again.

"Goddam," he says, "damn, I'm so close, Alex!"

"I know. Once more, darling." I lean toward him and take him in my mouth once again, this time sucking in earnest.

"Oh..Oh!" Mulder says, and I slip his cock out of my mouth again. "Alex! I've killed people for less than that!" he says passionately, shaking, his face red. "Finish me off!"

I grin at him, then lightly, slowly lick him, lapping the sensitive tip, the veined and throbbing shaft, then a little faster, then I wholeheartedly suck him the way he should be done, using maximum suction and minimum hesitation and he comes with a wild loud shriek into my waiting and willing mouth. I taste him, savoring the flavor of my love, and swallow. "Kiss," I say, standing up, and so he tastes himself in my mouth as he tongues it, and yes, he's got another hard-on!

"Fuck me," I say instantly; without a word he grasps my shoulders with powerful hands, turning me around and mashing me up against the wall, and I'm as hard as I've ever been in my life, and I rub my exquisitely-aching cock against the tiles. "Mulder, Mulder," I groan, "put it in!"

For answer he ducks out of the shower and I'm afraid he's going to tease me now, to get me back, but he quickly returns, holding me tight and nipping my ear, my neck. "It's my turn," he breathes, and suddenly there is a knife at my throat.

"Oh God," I say, "Oh God oh God," wanting him to use it, to cut me, to drink my blood as I have his; but afraid, and somehow not trusting this sweet, loving man to do the right thing.

"It's all right," he whispers, and slides the knife across my throat, in the cut-throat position but ever so gently, and there is a sudden little owie and a sensation of something wet running down my neck. Then I can feel his full and moist lips and tongue on my throat as he sucks up the rill of blood. My every respiration is a sigh, an ecstatic gasp, oh Mulder, oh Mulder, then he parts my thighs and I can feel him rubbing his big hard dick everywhere but where it should go, my cock, balls, perineum, inner thighs.

"Please, Mulder, please put it in," I hear myself saying, begging. "Please fuck me, Mulder."

Unexpectedly he touches, then gently rubs the blunt edge of the knife against my anus.

"God!" I say, "oh God!"

Finally I feel his cock lodge itself against the ring of muscle, then firmly shove its way in, thrust its full length and filling me utterly. Now he's fucking me hard, pounding his way in, then out, while his right hand sneaks to my cock and pumps it. Within a few strokes I am coming, arching my back and screaming, "Mulder! Mulder! I love you!" in Russian.

"Lyubov, lyubov," I cry, forgetting place, time, history and nationality in this, the most transcendent and fulfilling moment of my life. I am dimly aware, through the haze of passion, that now he is crying out, too, and I feel him shoot hot liquid deep in my ass, and I can't help it; I come again.

*******************************************************************

It is just sunrise when we step out of the shower. Krycek has insisted we get this shopping trip over as quickly as possible. "There's a Safeway that's open at 7," he says.

It's too bad I am enjoying the good conversation of the house and fascinating stories told by Gananaian, Chekhov, and even by Ken, whose adventures in the Aryan Brotherhood make him old beyond his 19 years. To my relief, Krycek has not shown the slightest interest in Ken, but treats him kindly, as one would a child; and anyway, Ken likes girls, or if he doesn't, at any rate, he is doing a wonderful imitation of someone who does. He tosses me a towel and dries off, looking abstracted. "Something wrong?" I ask.

"No, love," he says, quickly kissing me, "and thanks for the best sex of my life!"

"Any time," I grin, "you know that. Alex, you're going to need a Band-Aid for your neck."

He inspects himself in the mirror: yes, there's a little cut under his chin, and a smear of dried blood. Looking at it, touching it, he gets hard. "Mulder, do me again," he says.

"OK," I say, and am out of my undershorts as quickly as I can be. "Bend over the bed, Alex. Spread your legs. Now!" and I smack him on the rear.

He looks back at me with a wild green eye. "I've been bad," he murmurs.

At the bed, I push him down to his knees. I'm almost painfully hard, and from the way my lover is gasping, he is at least at that stage. "Put your head down on the bed, Alex. Face down," I say. "Now, I hear you've been a bad boy. You're on the lam, aren't you, and it's because you've - what? - killed a man? I'd say you've been a VERY bad boy," and I smack him hard on the ass. He moans low in his throat and I slap him again and again, till I must have spanked him 30 or so times, and he is writhing and rubbing his cock on the bedclothes.

"Fuck me before I come," he gasps, and I kneel in back of him and slide myself in. I drive into his ass once, twice, three times, and all hell breaks loose. Krycek sits up, yelps like he's been stuck with a horse-needle, and shoots come two feet in the air, a fountain of semen. My senses, all of them, are flooded with him: his cries, the smell of his musk, his beautiful body jerking in spasms, his tight ass gripping me hard, and I scream, "Alex! Alex! Alex!" over and over again, as the heat that has gathered in my midsection radiates piercingly to my groin, passes through and strikes my brain, and I am wracked by global, explosive contractions like a woman's, and it seems I might die of the pleasure. As I bang him during my orgasm I watch Krycek, incredibly, come again, spurting hot liquid all over the place, and then I do, too, the universe contained right in my cock, driving, driving into his shapely, compliant ass.

************************************************************************

I've never been the particularly organized type, as anyone who's seen my apartment can attest, but Krycek is, and sometimes his skill at this is extraordinary. "Beans," he reads from a list, "green-fresh, green-canned, lima-canned, baked, dried pinto, black, white, navy-canned, garbanzo-canned, fava-canned."

"Well, let's hope no one lights a match," I joke, and he sighs.

"Mulder, this is serious business. We're getting supplies for the next several months, and beans have a lot of protein and tremendous food value."

"Yeah, but so does a steak, and it tastes a hell of a lot better."

"We have a small freezer, Mulder. The best we can hope for is a few steak dinners, then it's these staples, plus what I can hunt and gather. And by the way, Mulder," he says, putting green beans in a plastic veggie bag. "You can help me out there. You're reputed to be a crack shot."

"Yeah, but who wants to shoot duckies and deeries?"

"You do, if you wanna eat 'em. Now, help me find the fava beans, Mulder."

Our purchases come to over $2,000, which Krycek forks over insouciantly. We're helped loading all the stuff into Doc Gananian's Mercedes. "How the fuck, Alex, are we gonna get all this crap up there on the horses?"

"Oh ye of little faith," he answers. As it turns out, Mikhail and Ken have decided to donate Tigger and Mr. Ed to our cause, as the two men will be taking up permanent residence with Gananian, and he is buying them a car. The tough little mustangs can easily carry 200 pounds apiece, dead weight.

"It'll be good to have a couple of extra horses anyway," the doctor observes, as we put the finishing touches on our packing job. "Your stallion, Alex, really looks like an Akhal-Teke."

"That's because he is," laughs Krycek.

"Really?" breathes Gananian, stroking Al-Marac's shimmery golden hide. "I've never seen one before outside of picture books. It's fitting, Alex, that you should have one."

************************************************************************

We rest near an alpine lake in a caldera, a declivity in the rock carved by glaciers of eons past, the horses cropping the sparse grass, Mulder drinking Gatorade, which he swears by in times of athletic endeavor. When I remind him that it's the horses who are doing all the work, he laughs. We arrive home just as the sun is dipping below the western peaks. In the gloaming, we silently unsaddle the horses, turn them into the pasture and carry our haul inside. "I suppose you've got some system for organizing all this crap," Mulder says sulkily as I push the front door open. Push it open.

"Fuck!" I swear.

"Already?" He jokes. "I'd like to take a shower first."

"Mulder, the door was locked when we left it."

"Oh," he says. I begin a rapid reconnaissance of the house. I don't see that anything has been disturbed, and indeed that is the way it should be; we don't exactly have home invasions in this neck of the woods.

Then I find it on the chalkboard in the pantry, written in an elegant script: "Hello, Alexei." As we put groceries away, I mention it to Mulder.

"No kidding?" he says, impressed. "So that and the unlocked door?"

"Are enough to make me think he's back," I say. "Here, let's put all those peas on this shelf."

Mulder is about to place the very last package in the cupboard when I jump him, pushing him quickly to the floor. "Ow! My elbow!" he complains.

"Shut up, Mulder," I say, putting my Glock in his back. "Now you lie there and behave!" He struggles and I nudge him warningly with the gun. "Lie still!" I command again, and he complies, whimpering only a little.

I snap and unzip him and ease his jeans down around his ankles. "Don't hurt me!" he pleads, and I laugh. Kneeling, I run the gun up and down his back, stopping between his legs.

"How do you like this?" I ask, and shove the muzzle up him half an inch, an inch. He is gasping and groaning so much it's hard to tell, but then he grows rigid and, with a couple of great sobs, comes onto the hard tile. "This is even better, Mulder," I say, and mount him, crying out my own almost immediate orgasm with a fierce joy.

I drop down beside my lover, kissing him long, the silly nose, the luscious lips, deep, deep into his mouth; and he kisses me back. "Great rape scenario," he finally croaks. "What's next?"

"This," I say.

I'm dreaming; that, surely, is what this must be. I'm standing alone in a dark country surrounded by wisping drifts of that hokey, yet spooky ground-fog made by dry ice for the purposes of creating atmosphere in old horror flicks. "Where am I?" I ask no one in particular, and expect no response; I seem to be alone in this sere and dreary landscape bereft even of birds.

"You're here," comes the response quite near, in a voice quite familiar to me, and I jump and look up, and oh God, it's HIM, and I shrink from him. "No need to be afraid," he says, "I won't hurt you. For a little while, you're in the twilight world I inhabit."

"Uh," I grunt, every atom scared, if that is the correct expression; I have doubts whether I have any more corporality than does the man/ghost in front of me, and "uh," again.

"You bore my child," he continues, "and you're doing a wonderful job raising him. The thing is, the child is in danger from the alien elements around you."

"Why?"

"Because he's special, and I say that not as a proud father, which of course I am, but because the child has an IQ of 300 or so, which you will shortly realize. The aliens, the replicants, want him but have hesitated because they're seeking evidence of his brilliance."

"Well, what do they want with him?"

"To be a great leader of their people."

"Even though he is fully-human and not one of them?"

"He's going to have amazing abilities, be a writer, inventor, engineer."

"But in the meantime he's a baby, he's just a baby!"

"And that's where you come in."

"I'm his wet-nurse, is that it?"

"You're his mother," he says, crossing his hands in front of him. Why do people in Purgatory or wherever this is wear business suits? "You're his mother, his mother, his mother," echoes over and over in my mind, and he fades and the dark landscape fades and all segues into "Dana! Dana!" and Monica Reyes's friendly eyes are peering closely into my half-open ones, and she is gently shaking me awake.

"Where is he? Where is he?" I ask wildly.

"Dana, you've been having a nightmare. Will is right over here with Leona."

"Oh...oh!" I say. "Give him to me!" As I take my baby he gurgles and blows a bubble. I am almost afraid to look into his round and perfect face to see what I might find there: a frightening glimpse of unnatural intelligence, uncanny and strange, as though unwrapping a Christmas present that turns out to be a kit for making a neutron bomb. Oh, Will, is that you I see, precious babe? He bubbles again and waves his fat little limbs at me. Not yet, I think, not yet, and it escapes me: "Not yet."

"What's not yet, dear?" asks Reyes solicitously from the end of the bed.

"Nothing. It was just a dream." Just a dream as the days pass swift and sure and edged with doom and all in this one half-breath moment, just a dream as my baby touches his yet-to-be-coordinated fist to my lips and says, "Don't be frightened, mother."

************************************************************************

I hated, really despised giving up the search for Krycek and Mulder. Now that I'm back in D.C., my work will be relegated to 1) keeping Scully and her baby safe; I've assigned two guards to the Reyes house, one to be posted at each door; 2) trying to organize my experiences into a coherent report, which is due tomorrow, and I'm not much of a typist; having to type with my left hand only slows things down even further; telling the truth while skirting it, as Kersh's ire is bound to be aroused by all this alien poppycock, not to mention all the ghost/possession/haunting stuff, dear God; and 3) performing boring but necessary administrative functions, such as withdrawing the APB's etc. I have it on the authority of the surgeon who set my smashed radius and carpal that I'm on the mend. Just this morning he removed my cast and has permitted me to move the arm, which is still giving me twinges, but which at least I can use for everything but demanding fine motor skills, such as ... typing.

I have not forgiven Alex Krycek for thus damaging me, nor Mulder for being a party to his criminality and for absconding with him like the irresponsible jerk he is; but my resentments have no outlet, and so I've been chewing up a lot of Tums lately. I pause in my narrative, tapping a pen against my cheek thoughtfully. From which angle should I approach the bird thing? There is evidence to support the spirit possession of a peregrine falcon? No, how about: a trained raptor was able to communicate with us through various means? Lame, lame. At this juncture my phone rings and I pick it up absently. It is Agent Reyes. "John, there's something you should see."

"Yes?"

"You should really come down and see it for yourself." She sounds nervous, her voice is shaky, and this is so unlike Monica. "Oh," she continues, "and please send some more guards, please, John?"

"You've already got two. Aren't you tired of having them around all the time?"

"Please, please just do it, OK? And do it right away?" There is no disguising the pleading note in her voice. She is a banana peel away from a slip into desperation.

I arrive at the Reyes house to find it in turmoil: yes, the agents assigned to guard them are present, and no, no one is hurt, but Scully is crying, wailing really, as is Leona; Reyes herself looks near tears.

"Did someone die?" I ask tersely, and with no humor intended.

"Everything's perfectly awright," comes a soft babyish voice at my elbow, and I look down to see Will, sitting up in Dana's lap and talking to me. TALKING to me. A month-old babe-in-arms, peering at me gravely through china-blue eyes and TALKING to me.

"Shit," I say, and "oh, my God!" and I have to sit suddenly, and my face is in my hands. "What's going on?" I ask my ten fingers.

"This," Scully says. Her face is tear-streaked and she bites her lower lip, trembling, a plucked guitar string in the key of pain. "My baby isn't my b-baby anymore," she continues, beginning to give way to sobs.

Rising and taking her hand, I have another look at her face: white as inkjet paper, skin stretched tight over her fine bones - she hasn't looked like that even recently. This woman has been subjected to too much stress, and it shows not only in her appearance but in the spasmodic sob/hiccups, the clenching and unclenching of her small fist over a sodden and mangled tissue. Yes, surely it is shocking, an infant so young speaking intelligibly and idiomatically in complete sentences, and perhaps Dana Scully has had one too many shocks to her system. Now she hands the child to Leona and embraces me, clinging to me, sobbing convulsively and not stopping. "He did it!" she wails. "He put a spell on my baby!"

This, of course, doesn't make sense, or rather it doesn't make immediate sense; the scary incongruity of Will's pudgy face and fat, uncoordinated little baby limbs with the sudden emergence of intellectual precocity is alarming her, as it is alarming me; but how much more so would it strike at the trusting heart of the infant's loving mother, doomed to trust no more. There is a soft voice and a tug at my sleeve; Leona has brought the baby over and he is beaming at me, smiling an adorable toothless smile. "May I have a cookie, pleeth?" he lisps.

"Sure," I say, and, disengaging myself from Scully, who wails the louder, go fetch him one. There is a flash - no, that isn't fair, but it's true - of Dana as the emotional infant here, and her child the equable adult. Of course, the baby can only gum the cookie, but these Jubilee Jumbles, cooked by Leona, are soft. I hand it to him and watch, fascinated, as he takes it carefully in his chubby baby hands and eats it with great delicacy. When he's done and Leona has finished wiping the crumbs off from around his mouth, he makes a pronouncement: "I know where the bad guys are."

************************************************************************

"On your knees, slave!" The order is barked and, goaded by the threat of the long lash he carries, I do as he suggests. "That great ass!" he says. "Spread your legs!" Once more, I do as he says and he crouches over me, inserting a finger, then two. I have been aroused for half an hour and at this point am mentally casting about for a way to put myself out of my misery. Krycek won't let me touch my throbbing cock; I try to rub it surreptitiously on the floorboards and am corrected with a stinging flick of the blacksnake whip. "I'll get around to you, slave," he says nonchalantly. "Now sit up and suck me."

"Gladly," I say, rising and taking his big hard cock in my mouth, working my way slowly down from the tip. Impatient, he jams it further in and I gag.

"That's what I like to see, babe," he says. "Oh, yeah!" and he touches me with the lash once, twice, and thrusts hard into my mouth. He doesn't come, though, not yet. He's saving that for later. "OK, Mulder," he says, "on the bed. Lie on your stomach." He handcuffs my hands behind my back and I nearly come right then. "Mulder, I'm gonna fuck you till you don't know up from down," he says, and I can feel the pressure of his manhood against my ass and then he's through the tight ring of muscle. It hurts a little, but what a good hurt! "Mulder, ah, Mulder," he gasps, pumping into me hard, harder. We come at the same time, screaming, Krycek spurting deep inside me, and me, all over the bed.

He rolls off me and holds me, looking in my eyes, green fire to turquoise sky, and kissing me. "I want more," he says, rubbing my ass. "I'm not gonna uncuff you. I want you to stand facing the wall. Yes, very good."

Once again we have congress, his hard cock moving in my receptive ass, and I groan with pleasure. I'm rock-hard too and release would be nice. "Touch me!" I beg, but it comes out as a command, and I am rewarded with a flick of the whip.

"Don't order me to do anything," he says, biting the back of my neck like a rutting stallion. He pulls out suddenly and stands, whip poised in hand. Down it comes on my ass, twice, three, four times, and I shiver with a delicious pleasure/pain. "OK," he says, "that's enough, slave. There are gorgeous welts on your backside; you should see 'em," and he mounts me again, this time in earnest, and he comes quickly. I can feel the hot jets spurt into my ass and then I come, shooting fluid against the wall.

"Mulder," he whispers in my ear, "now I wanna come on your face. Turn around, get down on your knees, worship me!" He taps my cock with the lash. "That's good! You should flinch! I want it to hurt a little. Suck me!"

I once again take him into my mouth, licking him rhythmically from root to tip. I am rubbing myself and he doesn't seem to object this time. He stands, trembling, eyes closed in ecstasy, grunting and gasping his appreciation, then pulls out and comes all over my face, and as he does, I come too, yelling "Alex! Alex!" and knowing in that violent split-second that I love him beyond the pale.

************************************************************************

I've got the baby on my knee as Doggett, Will and I look at a geological survey map of Utah. "There - maybe right there!" Will says, pointing to a spot in the Uintahs, then crams his little thumb in his mouth.

I snort. "We were so close! So damned close! The falcon was leading us there when we lost him in the storm."

"Yeah, well," John says, a muscle barely twitching in his jaw, "we've got 'em this time! We'll buzz 'em as soon as we can fly over there and get the chopper - should scare the hell out of 'em! Dana, are you all right?"

She is not. Her small face is swollen from crying, and as we look she buries it in her hands and sobs anew. I hand Will to John. "Aw, honey," I say, gathering Dana in my arms, "baby love, it's OK, really."

"No," comes her voice, muffled against my chest, "it's not."

"Dana," John asks quietly, "what did you mean by 'he did it. He put a spell on my baby'?"

She pauses in her sobbing to look up at him. "It's...you wouldn't believe me."

"Try me."

"He came to me in a dream, said my baby has an IQ of 300 and wondrous gifts, etc. And I woke up, and Will had been transformed into a precognitive genius."

" 'He' being the Smoking Man, I take it?" John asks.

Like Dana, I was raised a Catholic, and though I have lately abandoned my religion entirely, still I feel the urge to cross myself.

"Yes," Dana answers, unwillingly. "He's still trying to control my life and he's done something to my baby!"

"Well," I say, "He always was the controlling sort, or so I've heard; but I'm sure your baby is just evidencing superior gifts, really early. Both parents are/were very bright, Dana."

"I dunno," and the face she turns to me is dull, as is the voice. "I want to die."

************************************************************************

Dinner is crab quiche, raddichio salad, new potatoes and chunks of butter-sauteed leek, served under the light of seven tall candles. Siobhan is perched on my lap, a convenient place from which to beg tidbits, which of course I feed her. I believe that Mulder likes the food, although he is too engaged in stuffing his face to remark on it. He chews and swallows. "After we're done eating and cleaning up, can we do the vampire thing again?" he asks hopefully.

"Babe, we can do the vampire thing as often as you want," I smile at him.

"Often, then," he says, spearing a hunk of quiche.

"Mulder, I never thought you'd be so - so kinky."

"Variety," he says, pointing a fork at me, "is the spice of life."

"What, otherwise I'm boring?" I ask, grinning.

"Fuck no. You, boring? You're the most dashing, most thrilling, the most engaging person I've ever known."

"Better than Scully, eh?"

"Oh, would you stop! Yes, already! I might ask the same thing about you and Marita Covarrubias!"

"Oh, that was nothing! Less than nothing! I hadn't had any in over a year, she showed up, she was a warm body...she wasn't even that good."

Mulder snorts. "Uh-huh, uh-huh."

"Well, do you notice me chasing down blonde floozies all over the hills?"

Mulder grins and punches me on the arm. A sudden chill breeze blows in through the open kitchen window, causing the candle flames to leap and stutter and flicker hesitantly on the verge of going out. My skin prickles; I leap to my feet. "What's the matter?" Mulder asks.

"Nothing," I lie, but then the back door screeeks open. Mulder looks at it, alert and vigilant.

"I thought I locked that door."

"You did," I say grimly. There is the faintest sound of footfalls coming toward us, though made by nothing corporeal that we can see. Siobhan growls and jumps off my lap, and begins barking - at nothing. Nothing but a Presence that raises our hackles, all three of us, and quickens our pulses, and races our thoughts to a strange mad place where visitations by the dead are commonplace. Then the Presence is gone.

"What was that?" Mulder asks, his voice cracked. "Could our ghost have come back?"

"I don't know. But I don't like it, Mulder. I don't like it at all. I'd planned on going deer hunting tomorrow, but now...I don't know. I don't know fuckin' anything."

************************************************************************

I'm the one who finds her, bent over her bathroom sink, staring at nothing, holding one trembling, bloody arm with the other. I stop the flow of blood with pressure, then wrap it with gauze and tape. (That CPR training wasn't for nothing.) I convince her to get into my car and drive her to the Community Hospital emergency room. All the way, she gazes at me with those huge china-blue eyes and murmurs, "I'm all right. I'm all right."

"You will be," I say, and stroke her pretty hair gently. I stick close as a burr to her during the admissions interview. "My baby is abnormal," she says to the doctor, a nice young psychiatric intern. "My baby is possessed. My baby is evil." The doctor motions me aside at one point.

"It's a clear case of postpartum depression, with psychotic features," he quietly informs me.

"How will you treat her, then?" I ask, and my voice is strained even to my ears, tinged as it is with anxiety and something akin to guilt. I can't tell this fellow the whole story: he wouldn't believe me, and he'd hospitalize me too.

"We'll start with antidepressants and a low dose of an antipsychotic."

"How long will she be in here?"

The doctor shrugs. "Hard to tell. It depends on how fast she responds to the medication and therapy."

"What sort of therapy do you have here?"

"We have individual. With her insurance, she'll be able to see a therapist as often as necessary, even every day. We also have an extensive group therapy program. The patients on this unit are like Dr. Scully, very high-functioning, so she'll be in with her peers."

After Dana is admitted I accompany her to her room. The ward is a reasonably cheerful place, the walls a soft pink, hung with lithographs in complementary mauves and greys and blues, the furniture comfortable and expensive-looking. This late, the other patients are in bed, so we see no one but the night nurse, making her rounds with a trayful of medications, most of them, as it turns out, for Dana. She eyes me suspiciously. "Are you her sister?"

"No," I say, looking her in the eye, "I'm her lover."

************************************************************************

I dream I am slogging through some vast deep mire, lost, alone, and oh so cold. "Mulder," says a voice at my ear, disembodied, I can see nothing but the swamp, "Mulder, Mulder!" I awaken gradually to Krycek's shaking me and calling my name.

"Mmglpt," I say.

"Uh-huh," he answers. "Mulder, wake up!"

"Ah...Whattimizzit?" I ask.

"Just past four," he answers. "Yes, it's still dark, but I want to get a jump on our prey."

I sit up and stretch. "The poor deers! We really hafta shoot Bambi?

He nods and claps me on the back. "The sooner we get out there the sooner we'll bag one and be back here so we can play vampire, or whatever you want."

I fall all over myself getting up. "Wear those," Krycek says, pointing to some camouflage items he has laid out on a chair: T-shirt, cargo pants and backpack. It is how he is dressed. This man, I think, takes himself very seriously: he even has his face (hideously) painted in greens and blacks and browns.

"Rembrandt you're not," I chide, touching one finger to his face, covered in oily stage paint. "Kinda reminds me of playing Green Man."

"Yeah, well," he says, tapping his toe in impatience, "you're getting the same, you know."

We leave at 4:55 AM, riding Al Marac and Bint Sahara and leading Tigger, laden down with bags of God knows what. As the sun yawns and stretches and peers over the eastern edge of the canyon, we ride into the heart of the evergreen forest, the horses' hooves falling softly on the pine duff; then we dismount and unfasten the horses' chin straps. "Quieter, with just us," Krycek whispers, and we creep to the side of a stream. Krycek's hand goes to my shoulder to push me down in a crouch; on the other side of the stream are deer, Ma, Pa, Jed, Oakley and Pogo. No, I'm kidding, of course; I am just making light of their intimate family group in order to assuage my own guilt, which is considerable and is unlikely to abate. They are all, of course, incredibly beautiful animals, these WildMan's children. I look into the huge brown eyes of one of the spotted fawns and feel its strange wild knowing. Krycek's hand slips to the controls of his Kalashnikov and I fumble for my rifle but before I can un-holster it there is a sharp crack and the deer patriarch, a creature magnificent even in death, leaps high into the air then crumples to the ground.

"Got him!" Krycek exults, splashing across the stream. "One shot, clean through the head," he says, showing me. "This one's a big 12-pointer. I've never seen such a rack. I'll keep the horns."

Now I am treated to the unforgettable sight of Krycek dressing the stag. He slits it from asshole to throat and removes heart, stomach, God knows what - biology was not my strongest subject. As I watch him pull out yard after yard of ropy, slimy intestines, I am seized with a sudden compulsion to relieve myself of my breakfast, and I stand aside and vomit into the dirt. Of course, Krycek laughs at this. "Go ahead and bury that, Mulder," he says.

"Only if you bury all that..."

"Hey," he laughs, white teeth flashing in the forest gloom, "I'll leave it for the coyotes!"

That sound. I've heard that sound before. Oh, many times. A thwupping, a whupping, a thrumming: it is the sound of a helicopter, distant but drawing nearer. Krycek is already dead alert, halting Al Marac with a word, his hand on his Kalashnikov, his emerald eyes glinting. "I don't think we should head back to the ol' homestead just now, podner," he warns.

I nod, my heart in my throat as the beating rotors draw closer and closer still.

************************************************************************

I'm glad that Doggett allowed me to stay behind with Dana. I couldn't leave her for any reason, even were the choice between her and my job, I know how I would choose: she cannot be abandoned to that strange place with stranger inhabitants, only they and her tortured thoughts for company. At first, of course, even with pressure brought to bear by Doggett, the hospital staff balked at my spending so much time with her, as I am not, properly speaking, a member of her immediate family (mom Margaret and brother Bill are permitted unquestioning access); and they wouldn't even conceive of letting me stay overnight with her until I threatened them with a lawsuit and the name of a prominent D.C. ACLU attorney, a woman married to my brother. "I'm her domestic partner," I reiterated firmly until they finally capitulated.

Poor Dana! She's being medicated and she's able to participate in her group and individual therapy, as far as I know, for I am not able to follow her into those rooms, and am not sure, indeed, that I would want to go. Her psychiatrist questions me.

"She still believes pretty firmly in this delusion that her baby is somehow... that there's something supernatural going on."

"Uh-huh," I say, trying to keep my voice and face expressionless.

"I understand the child's father is deceased?"

"Yes," I say curtly.

"Yes, well, she believes she was visited by his ghost, and shortly thereafter the infant began speaking, or spoke for a while anyway, 11 months ahead of schedule?"

"Yes."

"And so, although the child is obviously extremely gifted, she came to the erroneous conclusion that there is some connection between the actual event and the imagined one, that the infant was 'possessed' or 'programmed' or otherwise controlled by the spirit, rising from the dead like Marley's ghost, infecting the child with supernatural intelligence and ESP."

"Yeah," I say, wearily.

"What was the child's father like? Did Ms. Scully know him well?"

Too well, I think, and that's DOCTOR Scully to you, asshole. "Well, um," I begin, "he was a businessman. They had a passing acquaintance."

"You met him? Did he date-rape Ms. Scully, as she claims?"

I can feel my cheeks flame. "No, I never met him, and I'm glad I didn't. Yes, you can believe her. If she says she was date-raped, she was."

"What about the rest of her story? Is it true, to the best of your knowledge and conjecture?"

"Yes," I say briefly. "I need a smoke."

************************************************************************

We can hear the chopper's rotors beat at a different pitch as it comes to ground, then muffled shouts. I look at Krycek questioningly; his beryl eyes are glinting in the forest gloom like a wildcat's. "How the fuck did they find us?" I whisper.

"Mulder, we've got to get away! Quickly and quietly!" he hisses, and he turns Al Marac deeper into the forest, heading east I think.

I ride up alongside him. "Where are we going?" I ask, and for answer he just shakes his head and points down the trail in front of us. We take off at a walk, then a slow canter, almost noiseless over the soft bed of pine boughs and needles, Tigger keeping up easily despite the dead weight of the dressed deer slung over his back. We've ridden maybe 3 miles when he reins his stallion in again. "Look," he says quietly, "they haven't left, which means they're not going to. They're going to camp out there at our place, eating our food, sleeping in our beds."

"They won't," I say confidently. "They'd be disturbing a crime scene."

"Uh-huh," Krycek says laconically.

"Siobhan!" I cry suddenly. "We left her behind!"

"Don't worry, Mulder, they'll take good care of her. There's bound to be a dog-lover in the group who'd love to adopt her."

"You talk as though we weren't going back."

"Maybe we're not. Mulder, we have two choices ahead of us."

"Yeah?"

"We can sit here, around here, nearby in the forest where we're protected, and wait 'em out. That could be days, weeks, even a month or more. Or..."

"Or?"

"We can set out for my place in California."

"Jesus, you've got a place in California, too?" I ask, startled and frankly curious.

"Yes, it's in a little backwoods place in the Bay Area - it's called La Honda."

"Uh-huh," I say, hunting in my backpack for beef jerky. "And how do you propose getting there? Shall I flap my li'l wings and fly away?"

"Ha ha, very funny, Mulder. We're riding there."

"Riding, as in, on these horses? Are you crazy? It's 900 miles or something and our route would take us through the worst desert in North America. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, and temps in the teens, or something."

"Uh-huh," he says. "Then I take it you'd rather stay here and turn yourself in?"

"No, but we could, for example, ride north through Idaho to Canada. Maybe we could get some kind of amnesty there."

"Canada, so far as I know, has no ban on extradition in capital murder cases," Krycek says bluntly. "No," he says, shaking his head decisively, "California is a known quantity. And NO ONE knows of my hidey-hole there. There's water in the Salt Lake Desert if you know where to look for it. We'll survive."

"How did they learn of your hidey-hole HERE?"

"Oh, they probably did some guesstimations, you know how that goes, being an ex-FBI agent and all that, Mulder. We'll take a southerly route, passing within a couple of miles of their camp, and they won't even know it. They'll be expecting us to reveal our presence to them somehow, maybe by a nightly sortie to get food from the house."

"If that's correct, then they still haven't reckoned on what you can do."

************************************************************************

We touch down, Young, Johansen, Thornton and I, in a clearing near a large cream-colored clapboard house. As the chopper lifts off we approach the house slowly and cautiously, weapons drawn. Yes, there are signs of recent, if not current habitation: an open window, a horse grazing in a paddock nearby, and from inside the house a dog's incessant yipping. The front door, unlocked, swings open at a touch. Inside, the house is furnished sparely but rather grandly, and there are touches of out-and-out luxury: a fully-equipped kitchen, canopied beds, Tabriz rugs here and there on the expensive-looking parquet flooring. The dog rushes us from some interior room, jumping up on us and barking madly. "Aw, she's just a puppy," I say, picking her up. "Border collie, and from the look of her, a valuable one."

"Found their room, Boss," Thornton calls, and I walk over to him. Yes, there is a closet with Mulder and Krycek-type clothes: jeans, T-shirts with ridiculous baseball logos and the like, neatly hung up. A cursory examination of the contents of a trunk at the foot of the bed yields some interesting but not completely unexpected objects: handcuffs, leather items, a whip.

Johansen looks at each with a sardonic twist of the lip. "Hey, John, how about you and me...?"

I glare at him, stuff the offending objects back in the chest and close the lid with a bang. "One of these days, Johansen," I say. "And by the way, you are to address me, always, as 'Agent Doggett'."

We find the pantry, kitchen, freezer and refrigerator well-stocked with food of every description, many gourmet items, and in the cellar, rack after rack of wine. I am puzzled. The house could be built, and many furniture and appliance items brought in, only at great trouble and expense. Where had Krycek gotten hold of that kind of money? And if he had, why did he not have a better prosthetic arm than the one I found in the hall closet, hanging with suits that looked too big, too broad across the chest and too long, for him? Oh. "This must have belonged to the old man," I say, looking meditatively out the kitchen window. "And Krycek got it, inherited it, after he murdered him. Makes a certain kind of twisted and ugly sense. Bad lots, both of them." Even IF that falcon had been kind of cool.

"They'll be back," I announce to the small group assembled outside the house. "We'll stay here for a while."

"What's 'a while'?" asks Johansen, determined to be an asshole, with his customary sneer.

"Oh, a few days, maybe a week."

"Can we stay here?"

"As in, 'in the house'? Technically, we really shouldn't; this is evidence here; but I realize what a temptation all that luxury must be, so go ahead and use the showers and the toilets." There are cheers; they are applauding my bad judgment. "Shit!" I murmur, turning away.

We encamp in the clearing, setting up butane stoves and the like. Johansen shows up with an armful of steaks and potatoes, and I sigh. "Johansen, you are tampering with a crime scene," I say, "and anyway, it's still only 9 AM," but after much pleading by the men it is agreed that we should cook the steaks on the barbecue; only after, however, a really thorough reconnaissance of the area. I dispatch Thornton and Young to a walk up the only visible trail, and I head south, down the trail, with Johansen.

"Plenty of hoof prints on that trail and they look fresh," he comments.

"Yeah," I agree, "they went thataway, at least for a while. Look," I say, indicating the trail. "The prints stop here. There are signs that the horses really dug in their heels, then nothing. It's as though they took off over the rocks, whether up or down I can't tell. There are natural caves in the area. My guess is that they've holed up, so to speak, in one and are just waiting for us to leave."

"Might they try to leave the area, make an escape attempt?"

"How? I looked at some detailed US geological survey maps and they seemed to indicate the trail's a dead-end. Which Krycek has no doubt surmised."

Young comes running. "We found a dead deer," he says. "You should see."

We follow him to a gutted deer carcass lying across the trail about half a mile up. "Looks like they went this way," I say, cautiously. "Crazy fuck! Goes up the trail, goes down the trail. And then goes over the fuckin' mountain."

"No need for obscenities, Boss," says Young.

************************************************************************

One morning soon after she'd been brought in, Leona came in for a visit, bringing Will, back to his normal thumb-sucking, gurgling self, in his Snugli. Dana took one look at him and ran screaming to her room, burying her face in the pillow and sobbing. I can only imagine the hell she inhabits now that would cause her to flee in obvious terror her own longed-for, cherished babe. By day, I shadow her, sit with her in the dayroom as she clutches my hand and whispers of "the demon" that impregnated her with his "devil child." By night, I sleep (nominally) in a grudgingly-provided cot by her bed; when the 12 AM bed check nurse has come and gone, I crawl into bed with her.

On the third morning, I wake up to find her smiling at me. "It's OK," she says, "I'm all right. The medications are working."

************************************************************************

Dana Scully's Diary: "I hesitate to place pen to paper knowing the inadequacy of my words to describe what has happened to me; it is so powerful, so terrible and so profound an experience that it is not entirely expressible in writing. Perhaps I should take up painting instead; at least it is a medium which does not attempt the expression of the non-linear, right-hemisphere in terms of the linear left. Be that as it may, I will attempt, in my poor fashion, to explain matters through this flawed, if easy for others to access, medium. Essentially, I've lost my mind; I've had a psychotic break. That's what they're telling me, that it's a stress-induced brief psychotic reaction. I'm not schizophrenic, thank God, although they are, indeed, feeding me large amounts of Zyprexa, a potent antipsychotic, which I take docilely along with antidepressants and large amounts of B-vitamins. I'm unsure whether any of this is helping yet - I continue to have intrusive thoughts, frightening thoughts, thoughts too dreadful to write down - but I have Monica Reyes to help me out. Thank God for Monica! She attends to me morning, noon and night, hands me handkerchiefs at opportune moments, eats her sack lunch as I down my pris - er, hospital repast, and holds me at night till I quit shaking and can sleep. It's wonderful that the staff lets her stay - wonder how she managed it?"

************************************************************************

When we arrive at a large rock outcropping encircled by tall Jeffrey pines we stop to let the horses blow. "That was quite a climb, eh, Mulder?" I ask him, popping a stick of gum into my mouth, which is dry.

"Yeah," he says, tilting his hat back. "I'm sure glad we're not carrying a dead deer around along with all our other gar-bahge. I draw enough flies on my own."

"Shame to waste all that good meat, but at least I got a couple of steaks off it. We'll have 'em for dinner."

"Uh-huh," says my lover, turning to look at me with eyes of brightest turquoise in that green-and-mud-brown-smeared face. "And how will we start a fire? And even if we could, wouldn't the smoke draw attention?"

"In your left rear saddlebag-" and he starts to twist round, "-is a gas stove, can of gas, matches and lighter."

"Oh," he says.

"And Mulder, um, you have to trust me on the smoke thing. We've had campfires, fires in fireplaces before on this trip. Has it drawn them to us?"

"No," says Mulder, but evidently he doesn't give any more thought to this, for he doesn't say anything further about it. "Can we get down?"

"Only if you have to take a whiz or something."

"Well, then let's say I do," he says defiantly, and dismounts. "Look," he adds, "I'm already tired, and we have to ride another 900 miles or whatever?"

"We only need to ride out of the Uintahs tonight. Out of range of immediate danger."

"Won't we be exposed to planes and trains and choppers and traffic and God knows what, not to mention vultures, out there in the desert?"

"No," I say, popping gum. "It won't be watched, not yet, and when it is, we'll be out of range. And we'll still be safe."

It is past the first gray curtain of nightfall when we reach the great plain, dirty, cross and exhausted. I cook the steaks over a real fire laid in a semi-circle of slate, and they are good, but Mulder is too tired to eat much. He stares into the fire, rocking gently on his butt. "Alex."

"Yes?"

"What's this place like, in California?"

"Oh, very nice. All the amenities, Mulder. Even two pools! Couple of miles from the nearest house. Hiking, riding, picnics, tennis, racquetball, weight room, Jacuzzi, hot tub, sauna, basketball courts, a field you could use for soccer. Private theatre. You name it, we got it. In its heyday, we had servants, the works."

"Sounds fabulous," says Mulder, closing his eyes. "Hope we make it there." And he falls against me, fast asleep. I stroke his thick, soft hair and kiss him, kiss him. He wakes up enough to kiss me back and murmurs something that sounds like, "I love you."

************************************************************************

We are eating our barbecued supper; steak, potatoes, salad, beans and French bread when a sudden chill wind blows over us, extinguishing the fire and upsetting Thornton's paper plate in his lap. It gusts for ten or fifteen seconds, then is gone, stopping as quickly as it started. As Thornton curses, I stand up and look around sharply, feeling very vigilant. "Who is it?" I ask clearly. The wind blows past us-through us-once again, and I feel the presence of a sharp intelligence. Then it is gone.

"Well," says Johansen, recovering his equanimity before anyone else does, "our very own haunted barbecue!" Someone laughs, and the spell is broken. I think I know who, if not what, it was, and wonder whether we should remain quiet and wait for instructions.

************************************************************************

The campfire must have died down. That, and the fact that in the midst of restless dreams I have worked myself out of our sleeping bag, even though Mulder sleeps with his arm thrown over me, can perhaps explain it: a bitter chill, like a palpable wind but seeming to blow right through rather than against me, so that my breath is ripped from me and I am left panting and gasping in its wake.

"Alex," calls a sleepy voice from the bedroll. "What is it? Come back to bed!" My lover pulls me back into bed with his powerful embrace and kisses me, and the uncanny wind is momentarily forgotten. Nestled against him in the sleeping bag, I can feel him harden, and his kisses become more urgent, his tongue parting my lips and exploring my mouth, then licking down my neck, my chest, my stomach and then oh God! He takes me into his soft mouth, all liquid fire lapping at me. Although I can't be sure what he's doing in the dim light from the last campfire embers, I can feel, all right, and I can imagine the full lips, warm and succulent, mouthing and sucking me, the wet tongue licking me. It is too much: I groan and come into his mouth.

"Now, Alex," he says, sitting up, "I'm gonna fuck you. I'm gonna fuck you till you can't see straight, talk, or walk. Lie back." He pulls out the dense foam mattress and rolls it up, cantilevering my hips. "Oooh, Alex," he says, in a way that makes me shiver, too, "if you could only see what I see!" He bends forward to lick me here, there and everywhere, and soon I am hard again. Then he spits on his hand and rubs his cock. "One finger," he says, wriggling his index finger up inside me. I moan, "oh, God!"

"Now two," he says. "Now me, Alex. Are you ready for this?"

I lick my lips. "Mulder, I want you to give it to me! Hard! Fuck me!" A moment later I am filled, and it is wonderful. During the fucking, which is slow but emphatic, he talks to me, calls me "slut" and " 'ho" but also "love," "sweetheart," "darling," kisses me long and deep, runs his hand through my hair and plays with my cock, stroking it now quickly, now slowly. When I come, moaning, shuddering and gasping his name, he holds me tightly. Soon afterward, it is his turn; he thrusts into me hard, hard then stiffens and cries out, "Alex!" and I can feel the warm jets of come shoot into my ass. I am surprised to see myself, hear myself, feel myself come once more in response to his orgasm, even harder than before.

Cuddling in our sleeping bag, I say drowsily, "Mulder, I came three times, you only came once. I owe you."

"Well," he says, "how can you be so sure that my orgasm wasn't three times as good as yours?" DAMNED if I don't go hard again! "Oh-oh," he says, "we'll have to do something about that."

He takes my hand and guides it down between his legs to feel his own erection. "Oh, Mulder," I breathe, "that's beautiful! Fuck me some more!" I turn on my side and Mulder penetrates me, everything wet and slick now, moving with little friction but punctuated with orgasms: mine, then his, then mine again, till I have lost count, till they seem all-encompassing and his seem like mine and vice-versa, and till we are both wonderfully tired and deliciously sore, covered, nay soaked with the effluvia of our love.

"It'd be nice to have a shower," he whispers into the back of my neck.

I laugh. "Soon enough, soon enough!"

"Well, it'll take us ages to cross the desert. At this point we're as sticky as flypaper. We're going to attract every flying thing, mote of dust, grain of sand and hunk of sagebrush from here to Reno."

"It'll take us maybe two weeks, Mulder."

"That's ages. And anyway, that's traveling around the clock, isn't it?"

"Are we doing that now?"

From somewhere off, a coyote howls and Mulder starts.

"You've heard coyotes before," I chide, but no sooner are the words out of my mouth than it happens: a tearing, terrible sound, a preface to a terrifying event or the event itself, perhaps, screeching, grating, ending in a high-pitched shriek. We look at each other in shock.

"What the fuck was that?" Mulder finally asks.

"It's something," I answer, "that I hope we don't learn much more about."

************************************************************************

"Dana, tell me about the time when you first started feeling badly about your baby."

"Well," I say hesitantly, "actually, it started...it started when we realized that the Smoking Man was reincarnated as, or was possessing, a hawk. A falcon, actually."

"Tell me more about this mysterious Smoking Man you've mentioned. Who was he? Did he have a name?"

I shift from my position on the couch and clear my throat. "Sure he did. I know it. But I'd prefer not to use it."

"It is a tribal belief in some cultures that speaking a personage's name will cause it to manifest. Is this what you believe, that you will bring a spirit into existence by mentioning his name?"

I shrug. "Not really, Dr. Feldstein. I just...oh, it's hard to explain. Anyway, this peregrine falcon showed up, just flew in one day; it had obviously supernatural intelligence, in the purest form of the word: over and above nature. For example, it constructed sentences with words torn from newspapers."

"Do you mean that they made sense? Did the bird seem literate?"

"Yes, and yes," I say. "One time it spelled out 'You bore my child'. That's when I knew."

"Knew?"

"Knew that the Smoking Man, and not Mulder, Agent Mulder I've spoken of, was Will's father. This was borne out by genetic testing shortly afterward."

"The 'Smoking Man' had some genetic materal on repository?"

"Yes," I say, "he did. He was a very rich and powerful man, as I've mentioned, so of course he would."

"You told me that you tried IVF with Mulder's sperm, that it didn't take, and that subsequently you had intercourse with him. Did you also have intercourse with...um, with this other man?"

"I don't know," I say miserably. "Look, this was how it went down: he induced me, with certain promises, to go out with him. He had a sort of, well a sort of crush on me, I imagine. We went out, we had wine, mine may have been drugged, I passed out and woke up in bed wearing silk pajamas that weren't mine. Later I assumed he'd been re-implanting eggs in me, which I still believe to this day."

"Dana." The doctor places his notebook in his lap and folds his hands together. "The eggs, well, that may have been true, although I imagine that, if so, it was performed by a surgeon. But typically, when a beautiful young woman is given Rohypnol, what is the result?"

I look down at my hands, noting that I badly need a manicure. "Yeah," I say, "I know. And that is indeed what must have happened."

"Didn't you think to check?"

I can feel myself flushing. "I...I don't remember."

"Dana, I know from your chart you are Catholic."

"Was. Was Catholic. You want to know whether I have guilt feelings around sex, whether I am making up the Rohypnol story because I feel so badly about screwing the old man and getting knocked up by him that that's the only way I can explain it, and that further I am having these delusions about being haunted by him, all brought on by my inability to reconcile my wanton ways with the mores of the Church? Well, I'm currently in a lesbian relationship that would get me excommunicated from the Church, so you tell me."

"No need to be defensive."

"I'm not defensive, and I'm not making any of it up. You ask Agent Reyes; she'll back me up 100%. So would Agent Doggett, but he's unreachable right now; and of course Mulder is in a bit of a jam himself or he would be glad to talk to you."

The psychiatrist folds his notebook shut and tosses it on his cluttered desk. "I think we've done plenty for now, Dana. The last thing I want to do is to upset you in any way. Why don't you have some lunch and R & R and then I'd like to see you back in my office in, oh, two and a half hours. Would that be OK?"

I stand in a line of 12 or so patients, ranging in age from 20 to 60 or so; all are women, and as I look from face to face I think, "pretty...plain...nice...indifferent," and back again. Monica is at home helping Leona with Will, and she will soon be back. My child hasn't given way to his scary utterances, and yesterday I was even able to hold him again. I understand from Leona's excited descriptions here and over the phone that there are guards all over the house, that several of them are "cute," and that she is pretty much beside her 19-year-old self over them. I can imagine, just imagine the look on Kersh's face as he was asked to sign a requisition for ten or so agents to guard a month-old baby...My thoughts drift back to lunch as I am handed a tray laden with Japanese food, rice and tempura and miso. And sushi, yum, I think, picking at it absently with a pearl-handled chopstick.

************************************************************************

After rising at 2 AM and bathing as best we can at a tiny, chilly stream we come to (and wiping off the "camouflage" makeup, as this will not be helpful in any dealings with actual people) we are able to make good time on the desert hardpan and reach the outpost town of Tooele by 6AM, where we find a 7-11 and load up on food and water, buying them completely out of gallon-sized mineral water jugs. "Are you sure there aren't more in the back?" Krycek asks insistently, and indeed there is another case. Water is lashed to every concha and saddlebag using every available bit of rope and lacing we have, and then some.

"Are you sure we need this much water?" I venture.

"A gallon a day, in the desert," Krycek says briefly. "Or more. And that's just the minimum requirement, and it's just for drinking. And, Mulder, that's just for us."

"When is the next time we reach water?"

"Unless you count highway rest stops, the answer is Wendover." Pretty soon the hardpan gives way to harder still salt flats, the deposits whitish and cracked with alkali deposits, and we canter the 120 or so miles without fear of the horses sticking a small round hoof in a gopher hole. As far as I can tell, not even gophers could live out here. On a water/snack break, leaning against the horses who are themselves slurping up tepid mineral water out of a feed tub, Krycek assures me otherwise. "Oh, there are the usual coyotes, snakes, birds of prey. Vultures. And yes, gophers. No, maybe not right on this alkali flat, but up in the hills you see ringing us almost all the way around."

"Uh-huh," I say, looking out at the desolate mountains, seemingly bereft of any vegetation at all. How could that barren landscape support anything thinking and moving?

Wendover (local wags refer to it as "bend over") is a dusty little gambling town; well, half of it; that half is in Nevada. The Utah portion is as dry as a bone, with as much fun happening as a nude vacation in the Antarctic. A mile down. With an alien incubating in one's chest. People look at us curiously, but not in a shocked manner, thinking perhaps that we're cowboys come to town for a little extra-curricular carousing, wondering maybe how a one-armed cowboy could find employment. Oh, you'd be surprised what he can do with that arm, I think, and...and... "You can't ride those hosses down the middle of the street," comes a voice, a deep voice. We rein in and look down: standing on the sidewalk is a big guy in a uniform, hat and sheriff's six-pointed star.

"Oh," I say stupidly, "Oh, OK."

"Boys," the man says (and it is not an unfriendly voice), "why don't you tie up the hosses in front of the bar building here. Tie 'em to the lampposts. You guys sure look like you could use a drink so I'll buy you each one. What outfit you workin' for?"

Krycek flashes him his biggest, whitest smile. Bugger'd must've flossed last night. "We're out of work right now," he says, "but we're lookin'."

"And ridin', too," the man observes. "Hella ridin', from the look of you. Come right in here. Boys," he says, as we seat ourselves, "My name's Ted Bartlett. I'm the sheriff around these parts, though I guess I really don't need to tell you that," he adds, glancing down at his star.

We both smile hugely, and stupidly. "Bill Miller," I say when I can think again. "Aaron Carter," rejoins Krycek, and we shake hands with our genial host. Mr. Bartlett is ordering for us: whiskey, (no Nellie drinks for us!) then it's Budweiser till our mounts standing patiently at the curb begin to look like Clydesdales.

As we settle into frosty mugs of beer "Call me Ted" Bartlett explains why he's taken an interest in us: "You're cowboys down on your luck and riding hundreds of miles through country not even a rattlesnake'll make a hole in. I was a cowpoke myself up until about ten years ago, when I broke my hip getting throwed by a real ornery Quarter Horse. I wouldn't of thought it was possible to ride through the Salt Flats in ten hours. Those little racers you have pretty fast? What are they, A-Rab?"

We nod, gravely and drunkenly.

"How are they with cattle?"

"Fabulous," Krycek says, evidently without thinking, and the sheriff looks at him strangely. "I mean, pretty fair, man, pretty fair."

"Well," says Ted Bartlett, slapping my back, "If you boys are lookin' for a place to stay, little gamblin', little excitement with the ladies, if you know what I mean," and he winks at us, I recommend the Cartier. Nice beds, great food. Or if you're low on cash," he continues, eyeing our dusty clothes, gear, grimy faces, "you can bunk with me. Me and the Missus have two extra rooms now that my kids are growed up."

We smile and shake our heads. "No thanks. We've got to keep goin'," Krycek says.

Mr. Bartlett shakes our hands. "If you boys wanted to stick around, hell, I know I could put in a good word for you at a local spread. The Lazy Q is lookin' for a couple of good cowhands, and you two even have your own horses. Fine-lookin' animals...hell, if you're in need of some quick cash I've been lookin' for some nice saddle animals for my niece and nephew. They need some good parade horses, and these are mighty pretty, 'specially that buckskin stallion. The white mare is no slouch either. I couldn't pay you what they're prob'ly worth, but I could pay you a fair price for 'em. They're too pretty to waste 'em chasin' cows all day long."

"I'm so sorry," says Krycek softly, "but these ponies're our only transport. We're kinda dependin' on 'em."

"I understand," the sheriff says. "But look, here's my card," and he hands it to us. "Look, you boys ever run into any trouble in Nevada, anywhere, they know me, you just mention my name, give me a call. And if you know of where to get more hosses like your stallion, please let me know," he adds hopefully.

************************************************************************

"I'm afraid it's all true," I say to Dr. Feldstein, seated comfortably on a leather couch, one arm around Dana.

"All of it? The alien abduction? The possessed peregrine? The mega-genius infant?"

"Yes," I say firmly, "all of it."

"Oh," the doctor sighs, "well, maybe we have a folie a deux here."

"We don't," I say, my jaw tightening, itching for a cigarette, "and I think we're through here," standing and pulling Dana up gently. We go out to the patio and I light a much-longed-for Morley Light. "Sweetheart," I say, looking into her pretty little porcelain face, "I'm kidnapping you, pulling you out against medical advice. We're needed in the search effort and you're well now, and can't progress further here. They're clueless."

"You do think I'm well enough?" she asks, wide-eyed.

"Yes," I assert, exhaling smoke. "Let's go in and get your little duds packed." Wow. Moving quickly here. I can't call Doggett; he is in the mountains and is truly unreachable; and I'm taking a real risk by just leaving without asking anyone's permission, his included; but I've got to take it.

************************************************************************

"No sign of 'em, boss," Johansen says, spreading his hands in an "it's hopeless" gesture. I nod slowly. "I guess they left up the side of the mountain after all."

"OK, you're probably right. We'll get the choppers up there. Maybe." I sigh. "Well, for sure we'll hike back down and drive along the route they're likely to have taken, and we'll send the choppers along it, too."

It takes us half a day to get down the mountain, as Young, who has eaten something he shouldn't, has contracted a case of food poisoning or something closely resembling it, is moving slowly and with evident discomfort, and requires frequent "pit stops." At the trail head are two women and as we draw closer I see to my great surprise that it is Monica Reyes and a determined-looking Dana Scully, complete with baby Will carried on her chest Indian-style. "We can't let the aliens get my baby," Scully says by way of explanation.

"Are you sure this is a good idea, ladies?" I ask, looking at her with concern. "We'll mostly be driving, but even so, your baby is likely to be placed in harm's way. Krycek and Mulder, I don't need to remind you, are heavily armed."

"As if they'd shoot an infant," says Monica Reyes scornfully.

"Well, not on purpose, but it might happen accidentally. Or there might be an automobile crash, all kinds of things could happen."

"Or not happen," she rejoins.

"I can't OK it," I say adamantly.

"Are we driving down 50, 80 or what?" she asks, and pulls out a pack of Morleys.

************************************************************************

"We turn right here, see the trail? It's very faint, and goes up into the hills," I say to Mulder.

"And the purpose of this is to - what? Elude detection from the ground? From the highway and all that?"

"Yes, doubting Thomas! We'll be going where no vehicle can, save maybe an ATV or a dirt bike, and I doubt even they could follow us."

"Yet they seem to have done a bang-up job of doing just that, thus far."

"What makes you think they'll find us here?"

"Well, for one thing, look, we're travelers in the desert. It's flat, featureless, except for these hills or mountains or whatever you want to call them. And no trees of any decent size to hide under. Any half-assed helicopter pilot could pick us right off. And for another," he begins.

"Yes?"

"Yeah, for another, there's that ghost. A pretty relentless tracker, if you ask me. Given that he's around, you have to assume that he can find some way to let them know where we are. Why, anyway, is he pursuing us into the depths of Hell?"

"You're being dramatic, Mulder," I sigh. "You need to give Al Marac more rein than you do with Bint Sahara, Mulder. And take it easy with Tigger already! He's got a reasonably soft mouth; maybe we should take his bit off; he's pursuing us because he wants something."

"From me? From you?"

"From me, Mulder. At first he told me that he wants my soul, hm, sounds like he's been taking drama lessons from you! I don't know if he meant that he wants me dead, or not."

"That's interpretable on a number of different levels. Typically, yes, that is essentially a death threat, or worse; but it may also incorporate a desire to be one with the object, the person, you: to own the soul is to own the essence."

"I still don't get it," I say, "but maybe that's because I don't want to."

"Sure you do," Mulder says, riding up close by my side, tilting back his sweat-stained and salt-rimed hat so I can see the gleam in his aqua eyes.

"Obviously, he wants revenge."

He snorts. "Obviously, it's so much more complicated than that. He loves you, Alex, with a love that survives the grave."

"Listen!" I say, raising a hand to my ear. "Can you hear them? The violins. La-dee-deee!"

He reaches over and jerks my face toward his, kissing me. "The thing is, he may love you, but I love you more," he says.

"Oh?" I ask. "Then prove it!"

In answer, he kisses me harder, and liplocked we somehow slide off our mounts without killing ourselves, kissing and caressing, then his hands are at my belt buckle and my hand is working his T-shirt off, and we're sitting in the dirt, our chests heaving and slick with the sweat of exertion, heat and excitement, our cocks stiff as tire-irons, rubbing against each other deliciously, and oh! The ecstatic union of breath, the living prana, a whirl, a dance in the desert sand. I kiss him as tenderly, as deeply and as long as my lust will permit, then go down on him, sucking him, savoring the musky-sweet taste of him and the silty grime of our picaresque lifestyle; and he moans and pushes up into my mouth, gasping, "more! More!" but I sit up and gently push him down, kissing him the while.

"Will you fuck me?" he murmurs, a question, a plea born of confidence that his request will be fulfilled.

"That's exactly what I intend to do, love. Lie still, open those gorgeous gams!"

He spreads his legs and I point my molten-hot cock in the direction of his glory hole. "Tight - so tight," I say, as I shove into him. He looks up at me with adoring eyes, strokes my face, my chest and then comes with a great gush of fluid. I follow very soon afterward, panting, gasping, shaking in a delicious thrill and shooting deep within him.

We lie still, I mostly on top of him, Mulder caressing every part of me he can reach, paying special and gentle attention to my left shoulder, from which used to depend a muscular arm, graceful as the shot-hand of Michelangelo's David, the mirror of my right. My love for him swells until I can feel it pushing against my chest, and I kiss his silly face, feeling an erection grow against my own.

"Alex, lie back," he whispers, although there is no one in this wide wasteland to hear us, "and let me fuck you."

I turn over on my belly, spreading my legs, moaning, ready for him. I can feel him settle himself behind my hips and with exquisite slowness part my ass cheeks, sliding a finger up me. The finger is withdrawn and the palm of his hand (I suppose) spans on, and inch by blessed inch a huge slippery cock is inserted just where it should be. As he fucks me, Mulder nips and kisses me, asking, "is this how you like it? Is this how he did it?" until I gasp, "yes! Yes! YES!" and come into the dirt. I hear him groan above me and know he is preparing to come, holding back until the very last possible moment as he pounds into me, saying, "oh, Alex! Oh, oh oh!"

************************************************************************

Alex's beautiful back is wet with sweat, not only his but mine, running off my heaving chest and onto him. "Mulder," he says faintly, "we've gotta get going soon."

"OK," I sigh, kissing the back of his neck and rising to a standing position, nonchalantly slapping away some little flying pest. We dress and mount the horses without comment. Alex then discovers that Tigger has spat out his bit, so he takes off the bridle and installs a halter. It is mid-day and the sun has already begun its broiling encroachment upon our necks and arms and the soft hides of the horses, raising sweat in a slick sheen and a curd of lather where the reins scrape against their pretty arched necks. Dust, and thirst, only partially alleviated by the stale water from plastic bottles; and the undying sun beating mercilessly down upon us, are our lot: but always we stay alert, scanning restlessly and repetitively, like the coda for some jazz tune we really don't want to remember, the edges of vision; the mountains and the desert and the blazing brassy sky. There is no sign of pursuit.

"Give 'em time," he says to me, as though he's read my thoughts, and perhaps this witchy man has. "At the very least ol' Sheriff Bartlett will begin to suspect."

"Think so?"

"I know so," he says with confidence. "But not to worry, Mulder, they can come within a mile of us and never see us."

"Alex, not to change the subject, but you said there were sources of water in the desert."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, so where are they?"

"Oh, we're headed toward a river now. Look at the horses! They smell water." It's true; their ears are pricking and flicking back and forth, their fine nostrils fluttering. We reach the river (more like a giant hog wade, from the look of it) at 1:31 PM by my Seiko, which tends to gain. We dismount and slap the horses on their muscular rumps, but they need no encouragement, running into the brown water belly-deep and plunging their delicate noses in for a drink.

"Is that safe?" I ask, pointing at them. Krycek, who is busily absorbed in filling empty water bottles, and there are several, glances up.

"It is," he asserts, "they're three really intelligent horses. They won't drink themselves into colic or laminitis if that's what you're afraid of. Here, Mulder, look at this. Watch me!" He leans over the reedy bank, pulling up a handful of greeny grassy stuff. This he places on his mouth and I am about to chide him for eating like a horse when he lowers his face to the brown water, using the unnameable vegetation as a screen through which he drinks his fill of the river water. "Mother of Rivers, I thank thee," he murmurs, looking reverently at the sluggish dun-colored water. "Now you try, Mulder."

"Only if we leave religion out of it," I joke.

We spend an hour or so swimming and splashing in the river, which is just delightfully cool, maybe 70 degrees, and so much cooler than the torrid air. Krycek, plashing around happily, has turned as brown as a nut - I wonder (not for the first time) where a person of his Slavic extraction ever developed his coloring -- and as I look at my arms and legs I realize that I am, too. Vague warnings about skin cancer and photoaging float through my brain but, hell, we apply sunscreen frequently, don't we? - and maybe this River Goddess or her sister, the Goddess of Young Skin, will look with favor upon us. One thought, one sad thought, surfaces and hovers preconsciously: we, Krycek and I, probably won't live long enough to ever have to worry about skin cancer, nor any of the usual other accompaniments to aging; and this strikes me so poignantly that I gasp as if in actual physical pain.

"What?" Krycek asks, lying nude, of course, half in/half out of the silty water.

"Nothing," I say, "except for the fact that Alex, you're looking so delectable lying there that I just want to ..."

"To what?" he says, running his tongue across that moist, that full lip of his.

"This," I say, pushing him back against the bank. One hand is at his throat, and he smiles a slow lazy smile.

"Gonna choke me like you choked Duane Barry?" My grip tightens slightly and completely automatically.

"No, I'm gonna choke you like YOU choked Duane Barry!"

" 'K," he croaks, and swallows, though in truth, it is hard for him to do so. While I'm thus squeezing his throat, gently but firmly, I kiss him, and he is kissing me back. I can feel his mighty erection pressing against my stomach. "Fuck me," he says, hoarsely, "fuck me, Mulder."

The conjugation is accomplished by feel, and by guess and by golly, as well, since his hips are under the sludgy opaque water, but soon enough I find purchase and my cock is sliding home, and I thrust spasmodically once, a few times just as hard as I can, because it feels so good.

"Ah," he gasps, and I choke him a little harder. As we push and push back, we create little ripples in the water that echo the ripples in my mind: wavelets that lap and lap, relentlessly, until, until - "Ah God," Krycek croaks, "I'm coming, Mulder!" and he squirts into the river. My hand falls away from his throat as I spear savagely into him, coming so hard I forget to breathe.

As we lie together in the shallows, I look at him looking at me, those steady emerald eyes squinting in the sun like Clint Eastwood sighting down the double-barrel of a rifle. He could kill a hawk, fell a deer with those eyes; or pierce the heart, the heart of a beholder like me: an innocent bystander, pulled into his sights, his remorselessly accurate aim.

I am such, I am he, I am the one. I am filled with a need to touch him, gaze upon him unceasingly. It is insatiable. Does he feel the same way about me? Just now he stares back at me solemnly, perhaps guessing my thoughts. Oh, and does he really know that they run like this river, rapidly, through cataracts unseen by any creatures other than those who only the Goddess of Nature has afforded protection; more slowly past wasteland and pastureland through the arid heat of the desert; slowly indeed, under a merciless sun turning everything to death and dust; meandering into an untraceable trickle?

************************************************************************

"He seems so normal," Monica comments, taking Will. "Just the usual month-old vocalizations, nothing more."

I nod. "None of the spooky stuff. Maybe that's all of it."

"Well," she says, jiggling the baby to hear him giggle, "Will, what do you think of that?" The baby coos and reaches for her earring. She laughs. "Seriously, though, Dana," she continues, looking at me, a fine line forming between her eyes, "In a way, you'd better hope there's more."

"Why?" As soon as the word is out of my mouth, of course I know why, and it is unnecessary of her to elucidate it, but she does:

"Because, girlfriend, we'll never find them otherwise."

I can feel my mouth forming into a tremulous little pout, like a five-year-old's.

"It's true," she asserts, tapping Will's little button nose to see him cross his eyes.

"No," I say staunchly, "you're an amazing tracker, Monica. The best. We'll find 'em."

"Hell," she says absently, "I've been over every hoof and boot-print. Will's wet. We lost their tracks up in the mountains and we'll never find 'em again out here."

"Yeah, well," I say, "we're using helicopters today. They'll flush 'em out. How well can those two hide in this flat featureless desert?"

"You'd be surprised," she says darkly. "For one thing, it's not completely featureless. There're the hills, and they'll head for them. For another," she hesitates.

"Yes?"

"Krycek knows magic."

"He's a conjurer?" I ask, stupidly, blowing on Will's silk blond topknot.

"No. What I mean is, he's a Wiccan, uses it as part of his arsenal, which is considerable even without it. He casts spells, Dana."

I snort. "He may very well think he does, but do you expect me to believe they'd have any effect? Come on, Monica. This is the modern day, not the Dark Ages."

She looks at me intently. "You've had several cases involving witchcraft and similar phenomena, all of them very believable."

"Oh all right," I admit, shrugging. "You win. You think he's casting these spells to prevent being captured?"

She nods. "Oh, yes. It's called a 'glamour.' A sort of veil, shielding one from prying eyes."

"Oh!" I say, striking my forehead with one hand. "All this time, he's been doing this? And that's why they kept slipping from our grasp just as our hand begins to close on them?"

"Yes. All this time, would be my best guess. He has supernatural forces on his side. THAT's why we need intervention."

"In the form of yet another ghostly visitation, I suppose."

"Maybe," she says. "Here, hand me Will, Dana. Just maybe."

************************************************************************

I feel it; it takes my breath away. It is as a hand sliding slowly down my arm in a sort of caress. "Getting personal now, aren't you?" I say quietly.

Mulder looks over at me inquiringly. I shake my head. "Something touched me. I think our little footpad is back."

"Just what we most need," Mulder answers, sighing. "As if the heat and this...place weren't enough."

"Speaking of the heat, we should stop for a water break." Mulder gladly complies, departing the bit-chewing Bint Sahara as if the saddle had suddenly become red-hot to the touch.

"Your riding has really improved," I note, sipping from a precious bottle of green (who could tell which flavors these things were?) Gatorade.

"Well," he says, lying back with his head resting comfortably in my lap, "I've had lots of practice lately."

"HORSEback riding, Mulder," I say, with mock severity.

At nightfall we make love and Mulder falls asleep quickly. As soon as he does, I pull from Al Marac's saddlebags several items: two candles, one white and the other black, each well-wrapped in a black silk Shantung rectangle; a spool of cotton twine, a small bottle of oil, and lastly, pictures of Doggett, Reyes, Scully and a group picture showing Johansen, Thornton, Young and others I didn't recognize, all grainy, cut from the daily news. Lighting and lofting the white candle, I say softly, "I salute thee the four directions: North, South, East and West." Raising the candle overhead, I look upward. "Diana. Isis. Astarte. Rhiannon. Hecate. Melitta. I salute thee. May you look favorably upon our efforts."

In the sleeping bag a few feet away, Mulder stirs, moaning a little, perhaps dreaming of tonight's love, but does not open his eyes. I have hesitated to involve him in my rituals since I don't want him to have to assume any additional risk, but still it would be nice to have a partner in this, the invocation of higher powers of protection.

Now I light the black candle, and by its light cut a length of string, which I knot while chanting, "I bind thee, John Doggett, from harming me or Fox Mulder. I bind thee, Monica Reyes, from harming..." then I wrap each picture with the cord. As I chant, Mulder awakens, blinking and snorting like a horse. Then he sees what I am doing.

"Hey," he says, rubbing his eyes as though they misgave him, "are you doing something to hurt Scully?"

"Never," I say quietly. "Mulder, now you're up you can help me. Pick up that scarf."

He bends to pick up the scrap of silk and hands it to me as I bind the final picture, Johansen's. I lay the scarf over the wrapped photos, chanting, "I create thus a glamour, that these and those in any way associated with them shall not see nor hear nor otherwise sense us, and that we shall pass in peace."

************************************************************************

When I see what Krycek's up to, I know immediately the intent, if not the particular details. Now, as I watch him burying the "poppets" (his word for the wrapped photos), I realize why we've never been discovered on the long journey up hill and over dale and desert wasteland. Krycek must have considerable power to have thus influenced our pursuit. In a word, gazing at him as he concludes the ceremony, I am impressed. "You've done this before?" I ask. Krycek's eyes, gold-green in the firelight, glint.

"I have. I'm repeating it to reinforce the spell. We can have all the campfires we want, Mulder; we can raise all the dust the horses can kick up - they'll never see us."

I nod, fascinated. "You know," I say, "I actually believe you, Alex. But you're not harnessing dark powers or anything like that, are you?"

"Oh no," he says lightly, and as he does so, he shivers and brushes his face as though he is trying to rid himself of something verminous.

"What?" I ask. "Our footpad? Our ghost, poltergeist, hant?"

"Yes. He touched my lips - it felt like a kiss, actually - then touched my cheek."

"Curiouser and curiouser," I say softly.

************************************************************************

I'm looking, all right, but I'm not believing. The "wanted" posters tremble in my hands and accompanying literature shoots out of the laser/fax machine. Those two nice cowpokes, good ol' boys if I've ever seen them, are actually fugitives, one an ex-FBI agent, the one who called himself "Miller"; the other some kind of Russian spy - Krycek - there's an outlandish name!

"They're headed for California," I mouth, then say it aloud, then I'm picking up the phone and dialing the number printed plainly on the posters, and I'm telling the pleasant-voiced young man at the other end of the line. "Out near 80," I'm saying. "Maybe up over the Pequop's. Yeah, they're on hossback. One buckskin stallion, one white mare, both Arab or somethin', then a claybank Mustang gelding. That's a reddish-bay, son, black points, some striping on the cannons. That's lower legs."

"Are you positive it was them?"

"Yes, yes, of course I'm positive. What d'ya take me for, some kind of ignorant country hick? That one, the Krycek one? Had only one arm. Yeah, I DID wonder about him as a cowhand. Shee-it!"

I replace the receiver and shake my head, picking up one of the faxed sheets. It's a map of Nevada, which has hand-printed instructions in a small fine hand; I have to remove my glasses and squint at it before I can make it out. I'm to trace their "probable route" and fax it back. I ponder this. Where exactly would they go, and it has to be exact. Close is no cigar out in the desert.

"Donuts, Sheriff," a cheery female voice chirps. It's my gal Friday, Annabelle Lipton. She's a sweet, pretty thing - Mormon, and she doesn't drink coffee with her donuts (or without them), only that Postum stuff - yecch! I select two donuts, raised glazed of course - what else is there? - and sit down with the map.

"Them two rapscallions could be anywhere in the great State of Nevada," I observe to no one in particular.

"I saw 'em ridin' down the road in the direction of the hills," Annabelle offers, biting into a red-jelly donut. How she can eat like that and still look like she does, I'll never know.

"So did I."

"Yeah," she continues, wiping a little trail of raspberry jelly off her chin, "but you turned away before they left the road to ride toward the hills. I was watching you, and them, through the blinds. Slow day," she finishes apologetically.

"Really?" I ask her. "Why didn't you say anything before?"

She shrugs. "Hey, Boss, I thought it wasn't important, that they were just ol' boys, just like you, passin' though."

I look at the map, and slowly, hesitantly, with a felt-tipped highlighting pen, I squeak a pink line through the hills.

************************************************************************

"Damn it, the choppers are completely useless!" I grouse, out of earshot (I think) of the Beastie Boys, for such I have been privately calling the Johansen/Thornton/Young contingent, not to mention the helicopter pilot. "They're worse than worthless, a waste of money and precious man-hours!"

"What makes you say that, Agent Doggett?" the pilot asks, appearing suddenly at my elbow.

"Be-cause," I say slowly, "THEY HAVEN'T WORKED! The bastards rode all over Utah, and we never spotted 'em, not even once! We didn't see 'em in the desert and we didn't see 'em in the mountains. I wouldn't exactly call that a successful mission, would you?"

The Reyes Jeep pulls up a few feet away on the salt flats and she, Dana Scully and baby Will all tumble out. "Anything?" Reyes shouts, running the few steps up to me.

I shake my head.

"Turn your cell phone on, John, you've got a message from Bureau headquarters. Evidently the sheriff in Wendover received their map and faxed it back with a possible Krycek and Mulder route and a note to the effect that he'd seen them yesterday - even bought them beers at the saloon, thinking they were cowboys."

I snort with laughter. "Can't you just see Krycek roping Brahmas and wrassling calves?"

"Hey," says Scully, unexpectedly coming to Krycek's defense. "Evidently he's quite a gifted rider and has taught Mulder his skills too."

We all turn to look at her, and she rolls her eyes. "Well? They've managed to elude capture for, what, six weeks now? Through the roughest country on the continent? You wouldn't call that amazing?"

"Yeah, don't remind me," I say.

"It's the glamour," says Reyes, biting into an apple.

"The what?" I ask. "Krycek glamourous? Not to me!"

"No, no," she says, around a mouthful of apple. "He's a witch casting a spell - a glamour - around him and Mulder. He can't be seen by anyone he doesn't want seeing him."

"Oh bullshit," I say tiredly. "If it isn't spirit possessions it's witchcraft."

"John," she says, eyeing me over what's left of her apple, "and not for the first time, get with the program. Already. After what you've seen and heard and done this tour? You should be the New Agey-est dude on the metaphysical block."

"Well, OK," I say. "Let's just say you're right, that we're contending with a witch or warlock or whatever. If we're fighting witchcraft, what then would you say our defense was? A Ouija board?" She frowns slightly, tossing the apple core to the hard sun-baked earth, where it rolls around, coming to a stop near my foot.

"Litterbug," observes Scully, jiggling her papoose, who inflates his cheeks, making a soft "pah!" sound. "We were hoping that little Will would start talking again," she adds. "But now we believe that the spirit has departed from him, the alien spirit, you know, and gone on to greener pastures. Somewhere else."

"And is now sitting in some crag or eyrie, or at the top of the world's biggest dunghill, just laughing at us," I say grumpily.

"John," says Reyes absently, but she is too preoccupied with unsnapping Will from his Snugli to chide him more.

"So anyway," I persist, "here we are, off Highway 80, a name to strike terror into the hearts of all but the most brave, and we are in Utah, which is synonymous with being in the middle of nowhere, and we're supposed to depend on an INFANT to guide us?"

"No," says Reyes. "Willie, you're all wet, sweetie! Turn your cell phone on, John."

My voicemail contains a long detailed message from "Sheriff Ted Bartlett" of Wendover, stating that he saw the suspects and that when they departed it had been in the direction of the Pequop Mountains south of 80, in a southwesterly direction. The map he'd drawn gives Carson City as a checkpoint. I play the message for Reyes and Scully.

"California. They're obviously headed for California," Scully says, snapping a fresh playsuit onto her son.

"Ah," says Reyes, "and what's in California?"

************************************************************************

I can't believe this. Every hour, on the hour, Krycek has awakened me, shaken me and called my name insistently, like a nurse rousing a concussion victim. The kisses that follow the awakening lead quickly to torrid sex. At 4 AM I croak, "Please lemme get a couple hours sleep, Alex." The campfire has died down to a few glowing embers but I can clearly see his white teeth flashing in a grin.

"Have to do this," he assures me, nibbling my ear. "It's to strengthen the spell."

"Sex magic," he explains, as we ride away from the dawn that covers the whole sky with glowing coral, "is one of the most sure and potent ways to raise power."

"Would that be 'sure impotent'?" I ask morosely. It hurts to sit, and my cock feels like it has been skinned and stuck on backward.

Krycek glances at me, smiling. "Thought you'd dig it, Mulder. Or are you getting too old for this stuff?"

"No," I say, my attention momentarily diverted from my anguish. "What's that?" I indicate an object flying low over the eastern horizon.

" 'Copter," he says briefly, glancing in the direction I'm pointing. "Don't worry, they can't see us. Stop looking, Mulder."

"This reminds me of that childhood game. If I can't see you, you can't see me. Really, if you think that, you're at a lower level of cognitive development than even I--"

"Always the pessimist, Mulder," he teases gently. "Just ignore that chopper. They can't see us and they cannot harm us."

"What about when we get to California, what then?"

"We'll meet with other Wiccans. The spell will become that much more powerful."

"You don't really believe that they won't be able to track us down in La Honda, was it? We'll be sitting ducks!"

"It was La Honda," he answers calmly, "and we'll be safe there. Trust me."

"I don't mean to be negative," I persist, "but someone or something ferreted us out of your place in the Uintahs."

"I know," he says darkly, "and I think I know who was behind it."

"Oh," I say, thinking, no doubt, the same thing Krycek was. We are in the mountains now, seeming so barren from a distance but up close green with stunted pinon pines and sparse shrubbery, our path cut now and again with stream and brook, rich with the most basic of life-giving substances, water.

We stop at one of these streams and eat a peaceful lunch, Krycek's head in my lap, his hand raised now and again to swat at a sand-fly. "Even in this blazing-hot hell, our own corner of Paradise," he says softly.

"Sunflower seeds," I answer.

"What?"

"Sunflower seeds. I haven't had any for a long time and I miss 'em."

"Oh. Would that make your experience complete, Mulder, if you had some seeds?" he asks, his keen emerald eyes flicking up to mine, his tone sardonic.

"No," I say, leaning down and kissing first just the corners, then the centers, top and bottom "bows," of his better-than-perfect lips. "It's perfect wherever you are, Alex. You make my life complete. You know that. Alex?"

"Yes, darling?"

"Are we ever going to make it out of here alive?"

He wipes a scrim of sweat off his forehead and resettles his hat on his brow. "Yes, Mulder," he says patiently, "we will. We'll make it through this desert, through California and to La Honda, but remember: no one here gets out alive. Life is a death sentence, as well you know."

"I'm so sick of the heat and being dirty and itchy all the time from the dirt and not being able to bathe, and the bugs and the icky water and lousy food and stomach always rumbling."

"I know, baby. But you'll be all right. You're a survivor, like me. I've been through all the deserts of the world, including the one in here," he says, tapping the side of his head.

"I know," I say. "Alex, you've suffered so much. I just want to kiss all the hurts away, forever."

"You'll have ample opportunity, at our place in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Chelsea, I call it."

"What? After Chelsea Clinton?"

He laughs. "No, the name antedates her birth by fifty years! It comes with the house. Oh!" and he is shuddering violently.

"Oh my God, what is it?"

"Our little pursuer," he gasps. "The successful one. The one the spell won't work against."

"What did he do this time? Apply an ice cube to your unmentionables?"

"Not to laugh, Mulder. He...there was, like a finger, a hand, that drew a line from my chin to my crotch, slowly...and I came, Mulder," he says, looking away.

"You WHAT?" I ask, in astonishment.

"You heard me. I am going to have a serious wash in this little creek."

"Fuck!" I say, shaking my head. "I mean, would you mind telling me how the alleged appendage of a purported ghostly...wanderer could make you have an orgasm? For Chrissakes?"

"No need to get all bent out of shape over it, Mulder."

"Me? Bent out of shape? Me? You should've seen yourself, Alex. You were shaking like a leaf and your eyes rolled up. I thought you were having a grand mal seizure, and all I could think of was, Scully, where are you?"

"Well, I'm all right now, Mulder."

"Yeah, till the next time! Boy, the ol' man must've been one hell of a lover."

"Your Ma sure thought so!"

"Hey, leave my mother out of this," I say, aggrieved.

"I shouldn't have said that," he says softly. "Can you forgive me, my love?"

"Can you forgive ME?" I ask.

"Of course, sweetie!"

An hour later we assemble our things and ride on. Impulsively, I rein in and knot the reins together. "What are you do-"

I embrace him and take him in a long, lingering kiss. As we trot on, I am stabbed ever and anon by pangs of jealousy. "Dead," I mutter. "I'm competing with a DEAD dude; dead as in late, deceased, former, ex-. Why didn't you STAY dead?"

A hot breeze rustles the boughs of the pines; is that laughter I hear?

************************************************************************

"Pretty boy. Pretty boy. Is you my pretty boy? Despite what your father, Darth, looked like." Catching this monologue as I pass Dana playing with Will, I can't resist a chuckle. Problem is, it doesn't stop there, and soon I am on my knees, howling with laughter in between whooping gasps for breath. Then the doctor in the house is holding me, admonishing me to calm down. "Someone like you shouldn't smoke at all," she says severely. "When was the last time you were checked for asthma?"

"I can't help it!" I say, still giggling. "It was funny, Dana."

"Yeah, as funny as a heart-attack during a tornado. Do you have an inhaler?"

"In my purse. In the Jeep."

She brings it to me. "Where's Will?"

"Doggett's got him. Now concentrate on your breathing. Two puffs, OK, and in four hours two more, got that?"

Doggett appears, carrying Will like a football in one hand and a paper cup of something, probably coffee, in the other. "Are you all right, Monica?" he asks in a voice filled with concern.

"Yes," I say, "or rather, I will be in a mo'." My right hand sneaks toward my left shirt pocket.

"No, you don't!" Dana says, slapping it away. "NO smoking, at least till we can have you looked at by a doctor."

"You're a doctor," I say logically.

"A qualified pulmonologist," she says firmly. "Hand 'em over." Reluctantly, I pass her the Morleys. "You should be ashamed," she says, eyeing the pack.

"Why? Because Vader smoked 'em?"

"You want your baby back?" Doggett asks suddenly and hopefully; she takes him, kissing his tiny button nose.

"Look, ladies," he begins. I stand up, looking hard at him. I am taller than he is by a few inches, and I have often used this to my advantage. "What's wrong with that?" he asks plaintively. " 'Look, women'," sounds so Neanderthal."

"Stop being so butch, Monica," Scully says, playing pat-a-cake with her infant.

"ANYway," Doggett, says, clearing his throat, "today we are not even following tire tracks in the sagebrush. We're taking off cross country, using the Magellan navigation system furnished at great expense by the Defense Department."

"Hey, at least it's not $1500 toilet seats," I say. "Do they work? I thought you had to have actual street names, numbers, things like that."

"No. The satellite they're linked to knows exactly where you are, in terms of latitude and longitude, at all times."

"Is Krycek worth all this?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "The question should really be: is SKINNER worth all this? And we all know the answer, don't we?"

************************************************************************

My transition into the spirit world wasn't an easy one, but then it never is. One moment I was alive, if not exactly well, and the next, the love of my life ushered me out of it. I don't recall any pain, really, accompanying my sudden, if not altogether unexpected, demise; rather, surprise and a kind of resignation as I was torn from one world and hurled into the next. I can imagine that there would be many more crimes and atrocities committed, if the living only knew that there is no Hell; there doesn't seem to be a heaven, either, but perhaps that is only because I am not in it.

I do know this: I am inchoate, unformed and I exist in the world of the breathing only as a visitor, an afterthought, a sigh, except on those few occasions when I can make an impression, usually through the warm body of a living being, on the minds of the denizens of the solid and temporal realm.

Then there is Alex...Ah, Alex, my friend, my foe, my lover, my murderer. Just now I touched you. Did you feel me? I think you did; what else could have made you shake like that? And oh, Alex, I've made you shake before. In great fear and in great pleasure alike, and they're actually not so very far apart, are they?

As I walk (and I use the term loosely, to describe my means of locomotion, which requires but a thought for actuation) with you and Mulder I have had ample opportunity to observe you two interact, and how proud I am of my strong, courageous son, but how it hurts to see you two together, knowing you threw me away like the newspaper lining a birdcage.

Perhaps I am in hell after all, and this is my punishment, my torment, watching your happiness with him until I've seen all I can take. Then the kiss on the cheek, the lips, or the seductive finger down the "seam" you share with all humans, are all that remain, all I can muster to remind you of me; and it is maybe a not altogether welcome reminder. What I would not give for an hour together again with you...but then, what is mine to give anymore? You possess most of my vast fortune, and Dana Scully has my new young son, who should have had a share of the money, and who now shall not.

Would I give my awareness, my consciousness, the perception of my own existence (made possible by a synchrony of escaped brain activity unable or unwilling to leave the Earth, if such can be said to exist outside the fleshly workings of neurons and glial cells and ceaseless electrical transmissions to an observer random and wanton but capable of directing the most marvelous coordination of thought and action) for one hour, in the flesh, with Alex? The answer is, yes, a thousand, a million times yes: I would surrender existence, such as I possess it, for but a caress from my beloved. Yes, he is my beloved, always, for although I cannot quite forgive him murdering me, still I love him to distraction, and I want him to know my love, feel it, as completely as Mulder does.

************************************************************************

"You know," Mulder says, as we lie soaking together in a sun-warmed pool in the highlands, "I could almost get used to this!"

"Which part of it?" I ask, skipping a pebble across the pool.

"All of it. Seriously. Except for the dietary aspect. I do not appreciate dining on snakes and lizards."

"When have I fed you snakes and lizards?"

"Well, that's what that 'beef jerky' tastes like. Reptile. And speaking of snakes and lizards," he says, and turns over in the water, fastening those luscious lips on my cock. I close my eyes, shivering a little in pleasure, sighing back into the water. When I open them again, I am startled by a sudden apparition, a vision: the man sucking me so assiduously isn't Mulder at all, but... "Oh my God," I cry, and jump, and as I do so, the man kneeling between my legs turns back into Mulder, my own beautiful Mulder, all 6'2" hunky chest and legs and arms and gorgeous, gorgeous face of him.

He pauses and looks up. "What?"

"Nothing. I had a kind of hallucination or something, that's all. Maybe the heat, who knows?" He returns to what he is doing and soon I'm riding long slow waves of feeling, punctuated by my sudden orgasm, coming so hard that I scream and scream and beg for it to never end.

Mulder is still pretty sore from the night before and I'm trying to go easy on him, but from the instant I plunge into that beautiful ass I've pretty much lost all conscious control and all I can do is fuck him till: first he comes, groaning and squirting into the water, then I do, clenching in a spasm so intense I see stars, shooting deep inside him, deep within him. It's where I always want to be.

************************************************************************

Man, this country is a whole lotta nothin', I think, scanning the horizon. "Johansen, do you think you can drive this vehicle without smashing it?" I ask irritably, after the 552nd bump.

"Sure, Boss," he says easily. "Just as soon as Mother Nature decides to make us a road, we'll be on it."

"Well, could you stop? I have to answer Mother Nature's call." Where I am peeing, a patch of mottled tan and black stones, or something, turns into a rattlesnake right before my eyes, all three of them; and I jump back. Coiling itself, it tastes the air, bifurcated tongue flicking in and out, raising its head to look at me, cocking it first on one side, then the other; then, apparently satisfied that I pose no threat, it slithers away under a rocky outcropping.

"You have to watch out for the local color," I say to Johansen, climbing into the Jeep.

"What?"

"Oh, rattlers and such. Snakebite is something we really don't need on this expedition."

"Haven't you packed antivenin and all that stuff?"

"Oh sure, but that doesn't always work. I've seen folks with permanent muscle damage, even gangrene."

"Yeah," Johansen says laconically, starting the engine. "What say Black Angus for lunch?"

I peer at the computerized mapping Magellan device. "A sweep of these hills to our left, then we'll stop for a while," I promise.

************************************************************************

Since we "stole" our horses back (accomplished with the application of bolt cutters and the hiring of four large trailers), we've settled into a routine, Ken, Dr. Gananian, Rosalinda and I. I care for the livestock: the horses, of course; a few sheep; chickens and a moldering pheasant I would never care to eat. Ken makes the runs to the village general store for food, feed, supplies; Rosalinda magically transforms raw ingredients like beans and tomatoes and cheese into wondrous burritos carnitas; and the good doctor oversees all with a pleased but bemused expression on his finely-cut face.

How glad I am to have the horses back! No less my sturdy mustangs than the pretty Arabs, Barbs and Akhal-Tekes. Ken and I have become rather ... close, one might say, and we're sharing a big four-poster bed now. He's a good kid, especially for a con, and I appreciate his presence in my life. I suppose I'm in love with him.

************************************************************************

We camp for the night, Monica and I, under the blazing and ceaseless stars, holes poked in the deep velvet blackness of night. "Do you realize," I say, pointing up at the sky, "that the light we see is actually millions of years old? That the stars we take as sturdy absolutes are as ephemeral as fairy-light, doomed to die like will-o'-the-wisps, some rather soon, but we don't know it? We see the ghosts of stars."

"My, you're cheerful," my lover remarks. "Why not just soak up the glory of the night, rather than scientifically analyzing it?"

"Because I'm a scientist."

"Oh, OK," she says, and kisses me. "Why don't you analyze that?" and kisses my lips, chin, nose, throat, chest. "And that?" and she sucks both breasts, drawing forth milk. I can feel it gush into her mouth, and it is incredibly erotic. Suddenly, I tense and climax, groaning.

"Want more?" she whispers. Without waiting for a response, she licks and lightly bites each nipple, pulling and sucking until I climax again. Her wandering tongue finds repose in my navel, then slides its way down my abdomen into the soft bush. I yelp with pleasure as the wet tongue burrows deeply and swishes around my clitoris with consummate skill, so that I am coming again.

"OK," she says, sitting up. "You play with me while I suck your tits. Ah, such beautiful boobs you have, hot mama!" I feel her lips clamp down on a nipple and I thrust one, two fingers up her and with the thumb, massage her clitoris. She comes loudly, screaming my name, then is silent, lying down next to me. We stare up at the sky, the color of infinitely dark ink, pierced here and there to allow streams of unutterable brightness, a record of the life cycles of heavenly bodies, stars, galaxies, nebulae; and most dramatic and mysterious of all, the Milky Way, of which we can see some of the closer stars, with the remainders stretched across the firmament like a gauzy scarf.

"Are we looking toward the middle of the galaxy or the edge?" she asks, after a while.

"The middle. We're a little out on one of its arms. It's a classic spiral galaxy."

She turns toward me and kisses me. "Dana, you're not only incredibly beautiful, you're super-smart!"

"Oh, no, I'm not," I laugh. "My grandfather majored in astronomy and he passed on that interest to me."

"Your grandfather sounds really nice," she says softly, touching my cheek.

"Thanks. He really was. Both my parents, too, super, super nice people. And Melissa...poor Missy! That Alex Krycek was partially responsible for her death. And others, of course, many others. How I hate him!"

"Yet he saved you from Billy Miles."

"Then he demanded that I abort Will!"

She sighs. "OK, Dana, calm down. You're fine, Will is fine, you didn't have the abortion. Thank God he's asleep," she adds, glancing to my right. "He slept right through our love."

"Yes," I say, smiling, though she can't see my expression even with her dark-adapted eyes, so quick to mark such things.

"Look," she says, "I know that except in the case of Skinner, and not even then, really, I haven't been touched personally by Krycek's evil deeds, and you have, and I'm so sorry for you, Dana. The death of your sister was the biggest tragedy of your life, wasn't it?"

I nod, my throat constricting. "Yeah," I manage to squeak. "Well, the man who pulled the trigger is dead, the man who gave the order is dead, that leaves only Krycek to bring to justice." I begin to sob. "Missy! Oh, Missy! And my baby's father ordered my murder, and killed Melissa by mistake! And Mulder's run off with her killer! How could he do that?"

Monica wraps her supple arms around me. "I know you still love him, darling. And that's OK. It's OK to cry. Crying gets the hurt out." She holds me and rocks me for a long long time, until the sky begins to show the first faint streaks of dawn.

************************************************************************

"I guess I must have had a bout of precognition, or something," he mutters, flipping open the notebook.

"How the hell are you going to access the Internet, 100 miles from a phone line?"

"Honestly, Mulder. You must think I'm really dumb."

"Well? OHHH!" I exclaim, realization dawning (why so slow, Mulder? Getting old?). "It's wireless."

"Yes, indeed." The laptop boots, dials up Microsoft Network, and MapQuest is quickly located among his list of favorites. He peers intently at the screen.

"Don't suppose you've packed a printer, too," I say, joshing.

"Yes," he says, without tearing his gaze from the screen. I am flabbergasted. "It's in my backpack, Mulder. Go get it, there's an angel." The damn thing UNFOLDS and runs on a battery pack, like the computer itself. The maps print out and we place them in our laps to study them. "The auxiliary has been built, according to this map," Krycek says tensely. "Mulder, we'll have to go a little farther south. Thing is, it's unfamiliar country to me, and from the looks of the topography, it's rougher than we've had it so far."

"Shit," I say in disgust. "How could it be any rougher than this?"

"Oh, it could. And can. But we'll be fine. The way we're going," he says, indicating with one slender sun-and-dirt-browned finger, "we'll run across a little one-horse burg -see? Potash. They've got some stores. Think food, water, sunscreen. Feed for the horses. Stuff like that."

"Oh, OK," I say, albeit unwillingly. He folds the maps carefully and places them in his backpack along with the computer and printer (I'm still marveling that he brought them, but then again Alex is a spy, and people involved in espionage typically take all kinds of electronic gadgets with them wherever they go). It's time to continue on our journey...

He's right, we're not three hours into the ride when we run into Podunkville, or whatever it's called. "Potash," he says. "It's called Potash."

"Potassium carbonate, or hydroxide. It's what's all over the ground here, right?"

He nods. "That, and other alkali salts."

We're pausing at the top of a low hill, and the woman at the bottom, hanging up odds and ends of clothes in her back yard, if it can be called that, must think she beholds an apparition: two brown and lean riders and their fidgeting horses, straight out of the Old West. I say 'must,' but then again, maybe she's used to such sights, because as she shifts the Stogie from one side of her mouth to the other she calls out in a gravelly voice, "Yer trespassin' on private land, boys!"

Krycek nods at me. I know what he's thinking, and it's true: poor Alex, with his one hand, is the scarier of us two. I dismount and climb down the hill toward the waiting woman, a stocky figure with frizzy grey hair, both arms akimbo, cigar and clothespins in mouth.

"Hi," I say, extending my hand. "I'm Mr. Miller and that boy back there is my associate, Mr. Craig. We don't mean to trespass, Ma'am. We're famished and wonderin' if you could recommend somewheres to go?"

The cigar shifts again and finally a rough, work-hardened hand is put into mine. "Oxley," she says. "Friends just call me Cora Mae. Or Ugly, or Hey You. You'n yore friend come in, leave the horse in the corral over there, set a spell, have some pork chop and beans 'n' Coke, beer, whatever you like."

"Thank you!" I say warmly. I signal to Alex and he dismounts, leading Al Marac and Tigger down to the fenced enclosure.

"Mighty fine pieces o' horseflesh you got," Cora Mae observes, raking the beasts with a practiced eye. "I buy and sell horses, some, and I can tell. Give you three thousand, cash, for that buckskin stallion," thinking, that animal, looks like a damn' Akhal-Teke for Chrissake, will go for 15 grand or more in Reno, even without papers. Most beautiful horse I've ever seen, and such nice manners for a stallion.

"Not for sale at any price, I'm afraid," says Krycek, grinning and shaking her hand. "Though you could have the mare for that. Racing stock, superb bloodlines, halter champion."

"Hey," I say with dignity, "Please don't be sellin' my mount out from under me."

We eat pork chops, beans, corn, biscuits, cole slaw and apple pie a la mode, while Cora Mae, cigar clamped firmly in the right side of her mouth - seems to be the preferred side; she's missing a couple of front teeth there - regales us with tales of the hinterlands. "Yeah, there was that time that ol' Chuck Cantor fell in the hogtrough, drunk as a skunk..." her voice fades away. The cigar travels slightly, and is chewed. She seems to be trying to look around us. She is, in fact, trying to watch the TV. "You two make a better door than you do a window," she remarks.

"...anyone with any knowledge of these two fugitives, please contact the FBI at this number," the newscaster blares.

Cora Mae's berry-brown eyes, one of which, we have learned, is glass, shift in our direction. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Krycek tensing. No, don't blow it, I silently plead.

The cigar comes out and is laid on her dinnerplate to passively perfume the air. "Well," she says at last. "Ya know, you boys might've been honest with me at the beginnin'..." she sighs. "I'm not gonna turn you in. Doncha think I been in trouble in my time? Where'd ya think I got this here eye from?" she asks, pointing to the glass one. "An' I could show you scars - and whaddya think of this pitchur?" she pulls up her blouse to reveal a Chinese dragon tattoo coiling over chest, abdomen and both upper arms.

"Pretty impressive," Krycek says warmly.

"Yeah, don't worry," she says. "Now look, boys, you're welcome to bunk here. I got two extra bedrooms, I got plenty of food - grow most of it m'self - blankets, soap, shampoo, anything you could want. You wouldn't be puttin' me out none."

I look at Krycek. He nods, and says, "we'd be more'n happy to take you up on your kind offer, ma'am. We'll be quiet, I promise."

"Then it's settled," she says, beaming. "I can't remember the last time I had comp'ny. Tell you what," she says, looking us up and down. "I've got a friend who's a hairdresser. Name's Gina. Yer hair looks awful. Fried, and at least two colors each. I take it you were tryin' to disguise yourselves?"

"Yes," I say, looking down. "But as you recognized us right off the TV, guess it didn't take too good."

She snorts. "That it didn't, boys. I'll call Gina and I'm sure she'll be here soon."

Gina was a tall, drop-dead-gorgeous brunette. "No, I'm not Italian, just got a set of folks with ridiculous tastes in names. My brother's named Almanzo. You know, I'm going to make, um, Mr. Miller here a redhead. Don't look like that, you'll look good in it. A dark auburn color, not screaming clown-red. And Mr. Craig, you are going to be a nice bronzy-streaky light brown."

"You mean babyshit brown?"

She laughs. "I can already tell you two're gonna be fun to work on. I have a girlfriend -no, now why that funny look?" she asks, twisting Krycek's head forward. "I have a girlfriend, she's real cute, you'll like her, so maybe her and me and you two could all go out sometime? There's not a lot to do. There's a roadhouse, has live bands every Friday and Saturday night, there's a little movie theater - though you know, last movie they showed in there was a queer thing about a group of homo friends...I saw it, there weren't nothin' else to do..."

Krycek's eyes glaze and one drifts to the side slightly and I know that he is very tired, is dying to sleep and is completely uninterested in this ditzy girl's homophobic description of a fourth-run film. After a couple of hours, we are dyed, cut and shaved (and made much over), and trailing a skein of cigar smoke, our hostess shows us to our rooms. We make a big show out of performing nightly ablutions (alone) and making other preparations for our separate beds, then, as soon as Cora Mae's back is turned, I move out into the hall and on to Krycek's room.

"If we make love, we'll have to be really quiet," he whispers warningly. "These walls are just like paper."

************************************************************************

In the morning, the mistress of the house knocks twice on Krycek's door, then lets herself in, staring for a long time at the two of us, an entanglement of limbs and butts and faces, then she sighs and shifts her morning cigar.

"I WAS HOPIN' YOU TWO'D MAKE NICE BOYFRIENDS FOR GINA 'N' LISA," she says loudly. Two words into her high-decibel proclamation, we are jumping up and hurriedly getting dressed. "Boy," she says over coffee and Stogie, "You two're too much! What made ya think you had to hide it from me?"

"Well," Krycek says, "We'd have to hide it from at least 99% of the population of rural Nevada, that's why. It's a statistical thing."

"Well, if you didn't pick up that I'm an ol' bull-dyke, then I'd hafta say yer 'gaydar' is busted."

"Oh," I say, looking at Krycek, and then we both laugh so hard that Cora Mae's 'expresso,' that is to say amped-up mud, squirts out of one of Krycek's oh-so-delicate nostrils.

"So's anyways," she continues, "I'm gonna show you yer route into California. It'll skirt the edges of Bishop, then up you go over the Sierra Nevada. I know you two," she says, eyeing us, "are prob'ly in a' all-fired hurry. An' I think you should be."

************************************************************************

Around mid-day the Magellan equipment ceases to function in any way that could conceivably do us any good. "What the hell is going on?" I ask Johansen irritably, as he hauls out the toolbox from the back seat of the Jeep.

"Fuck if I know, Boss," he answers calmly. "I'm just gonna see if everything's seated right."

"And if it isn't?"

Johansen regards me, hazel eyes in a newly-tanned face, golden lock of hair sweeping over one brow, red lips turned up in their characteristic smirk, and I think irrelevantly (and irrationally - must be the heat!), here is one good-looking man. Nobody I'd want to sleep with, of course, but he must find plenty of takers. "If something is loose, I solder it down," he is saying, logically.

"And if it isn't?"

He sighs. "Then I check for PC board integrity, that kind of thing. If that checks out, it's probably the satellite. And if that's the case, there's not a damned thing you or I can do about that." He tinkers with the computerized thingamajig while I take a whiz (out of sight, of course; one never knows) and then stand stretching in the poor patch of shade offered by a pinon pine or something. I've never bothered to learn the names of natural things, save as they directly relate to crime fighting and problem-solving, and I'm not about to start now. Johansen pulls his long body out of the front seat of the Jeep and stands up.

"Well?"

"There's nothing mechanically or structurally wrong with it. It's just the satellite," he says blandly. "No biggie."

"Yeah, I'd call it a very BIG biggie!"

He sighs again. "Boss, don't get your panties in a bunch. Take a chill pill or something."

Well, we can either drive back to the highway and arrange for a pickup, or something, or wait here for the Telsat to resume transmissions all on its little beeping own, and neither choice sounds appealing. I say, "I think I will take a pill. Can you keep on driving for a while, if I sleep? Let's head back to the main road."

************************************************************************

"Nice that Coretta Mae mapped the whole thing out for us," Mulder says.

"Yes," I agree, as we crest the first hill. "And even nicer that she's calling ahead to her friends along the way. If those were her friends she was calling."

Mulder clucks at me. "You're so paranoid, Alex."

"I've had to learn to be," I say. "My 'paranoia,' as you name it, is usually just healthy anxiety. Better a live dog than a dead lion, you know?" he grins.

"You know, though, I do believe she can be trusted."

"Why, because she has one of those 'honest faces'? That face BETTER be honest!"

Mulder sighs, a great big sigh. "Look, Alex, we'll be in California before you know it, then you'll feel better; we've been out..."

"Of my old stomping grounds? My area of expertise? My territory?"

"Well, yeah, yeah and yeah," he admits. "I hope this map she drew is cool," he adds, pulling the carefully-folded-up paper out of his shirt pocket.

"Well, the first stop is at a small natural lake, that should keep us cool...Johnson's Pool."

He looks at me and begins to snicker. "Johnsons's Pull?" and I reach over and smack him upside the head. His hat flies off and amid guffaws (from both parties), he dismounts to retrieve it.

"You shore don't look the same without your hat, Clit, I mean Clint," I intone, and he stuffs it on his head, grinning. "So how much longer to California, Alex?" he asks.

"Bishop is a day's hard ride away. Day and a half."

"Really? I had no idea we were so close."

"You saw the map. And we will ride faster. We're just within striking distance now. And no one, no one, Mulder, will find us in the Sierras."

************************************************************************

"You'd think with all this satellite-based equipment that they could make a damned cell phone that works," I bitch.

"Yeah," Dana Scully agrees, tilting back a sport bottle. A little bit of red Gatorade leaks out of the seal she's made with her beautiful lips and trickles down her chin, looking like dilute blood. She wipes it away. "They're on the verge of doing that, you know. Closer than you'd think."

"Close but no cigar," I say, "hand me the Gatorade, Dana."

"Well, the problem is not with the satellite per se than with the satellite technology. It's with the transmission technology. You know how it is even in a crowded city, a major city, where you can get dead spots, dropped calls, can't even place a call?"

"Uh-huh. Not enough transmitters. Simple as that, right?"

"Right. And look," she waves her hand, pirouetting in a graceful circle. "You don't see any transmitters around here."

"Yeah," I agree, swallowing salty fruit punch, "but you'd think there'd be means of amplification, propagation..."

"Oh, they're working on that, and it should be available in a matter of even just a few months."

"And that helps us a whole hell of a lot."

"It might," she says cautiously. "Gatorade, please. Look, Telsat's conked out for whatever reason and without it these maps we have are almost useless. They're not detailed enough."

"Hell," I say, "even WITH Telsat they're worthless, because...because why, Dana?"

***********************************************************************

I am hot, sticky, sweaty, one almost might say filthy, I am dying to give myself even a "whore's bath," and now I'm a little crabby. "Because," I sigh, undoing Will from his child seat, "even when we know where WE are, we don't know where THEY are, and this whole venture becomes a friggin' snipe hunt."

I've been noticing, watching out of the corners of my eyes, dark storm clouds gathering, first hovering on the edges of vision, then rushing up to us in a disconcerting way, as though we'd called in a herd of black sheep. There is a flash of intensely bright light and then the inevitable ear-hurting crash of thunder, and the lightning is close, very close; this is followed by rain. Rain, hell. "It's hail!" I hear someone nearby squeaking, and it is me. It is hail, indeed: big, bigger stones almost the size of the proverbial golf balls.

"Get inside the car!" Monica screams, her voice torn from her. Weeping, leaning over to protect the baby, I climb into the Jeep. She takes a few hits to the head and shoulders before she's in after us, slithering into the driver's seat.

As we watch, trembling, both of us clutching Will, a particularly large hailstone strikes the windshield, shattering it into a spider's web of cracks and shards. Then the hail turns immediately into rain, which pours over the Jeep and turns the hardpan into a muddy brown torrent.

"Oh, great," Monica says, "we won't be able to use the washes to get back. There'll be flash floods everywhere."

"Then what'll we do?" I ask. Will begins to cry, first a hiccup, then another, then a full-out leather-lunged wail.

"We'll sit tight for a while," she says, chewing on a nail. "We have to."

************************************************************************

Johansen's deft piloting of this mud-craft around boulders (made no less solid by the rain) and across instant creeks and streams formed by the deluge is worthy of comment, though I'll be damned if I compliment him on anything. He'd probably take it as a come-on. We make it back to what I've been considering, and calling, "Base Camp;" an unimaginative but fitting moniker for the home base of our expedition, the rain stopping as suddenly as it began, within spitting distance of Highway 80.

"Johansen, get some shut-eye or something," I say, making a dive for my tent. Lying on the damp sleeping bag, I watch projected onto the interiors of my eyelids the events of the past few days. "The road goes ever on and on," I murmur, "that was the one. They're making a movie," and then I crash.

************************************************************************

At some point during the long afternoon, the decision is made, whether by Krycek or myself, or mutually, I do not know: we'll ride through the night. Hard. "How can the horses see well enough to gallop?" I complain. "They don't have the best night vision, do they?"

"They've done all right so far," says Krycek brusquely, "and I consider it worth the risk. "Only thing is," he continues thoughtfully, looking at Tigger, "I don't know if he can keep up with us. Al and Bint are racehorses, Mulder."

"Then we'll go slower."

"Uh-huh," he says, as if unconvinced. "You've been giving Tigger lots of grain. Let's give it a try." We set off at a fast canter, then a cluck and a tap with the quirt and it is a run, Tigger in the rear, gamely trying to keep up.

Krycek glances back. "No," he calls, "no can do." We halt and he dismounts, untacking the Mustang, then lays his hand on the horse's pretty face and speaks to him in low tones that I can't hear. Lastly he slaps Tigger on the rump and returns to re-mount Al Marac.

"What was all that about?" I ask him, consumed with curiosity.

"Nothing," he says, "I called down a blessing on the horse, that he'd make it to wherever he's supposed to go, and safely, that no mountain lions or wolves, etc. would eat him."

"Will he really be OK wandering around the wilderness?"

Krycek laughs. "Of course. He is a mustang, remember. A wild horse, with a wild horse's ways and ken and canny."

It amazes me not that our horses can travel this distance at this rate of speed, for I know, from what Krycek has been telling me, that Arabs and Akhal-Tekes are the toughest horses in the world and the fastest at long distances; but that they are so sure-footed in the dark that they never put a small round hoof wrong.

Ka-thud-thud, ka-thud-thud. Listening to the hoofbeats falling, so regularly, so sure, I suppose I've fallen under some kind of hypnotic trance, for I don't remember the rest of the trip well at all, and Krycek has to poke me and yell at me to bring me back to the land of the living. "Look! Look!" he is saying insistently. I open my eyes, the thought moving like a ghost-snake in my mind: how have I managed to ride Bint Sahara asleep? Then I see what he is pointing at. We're on a ridge cresting a valley, green in places, cultivated, and at the center of the defile, a town.

"Bishop!" Krycek exclaims. "We made it!"

************************************************************************

We ride down into the valley. This is a fairly modern town, with gas stations advertising relatively inexpensive fuel; restaurants; we pass a Saturn dealership and the disloyal thought crosses my mind: this might be the time to sell the horses and buy ATVs, mountain bikes, for the passage of the Sierra. I look up at the sharp eastern scarp of the great range and think no, no mountain bike will make it up over Mt. Whitney. Anyway, there is no time to sell the horses. I suppose I could give them away, but how ignominious for the spirited Al Marac and the lovely Bint Sahara to end up some spoiled teenager's neglected pets!

We tie the horses up at a Safeway on the outskirts of town. "Food," says Mulder, intelligently, and he swallows.

"What've you had for the past week?"

"Power Bars and beef jerky do not qualify as food," he says, striding through the automatic doors into the cool interior of the market. It is said that it's unwise to shop when one is hungry - perhaps that's why we buy hamburger, buns, ketchup, relish, onions, canned beans, tomatoes, butter, milk, eggbeaters, potatoes, carrots, celery, apples, grapes, oranges, kiwi, strawberries, rum, bread, peanut butter, jam, crackers, cheese, cream cheese, bagels, lox, lunchmeat, Miracle Whip, spices, garlic, artichoke hearts, dried fruits of every description, goat cheese, cottage cheese, lettuce, applesauce, butternut squash... "We'll never get these on the horses," I complain.

Mulder stands at the checkout counter and as I hand him items, he plops them onto the conveyor belt with one hand, the other being occupied in stuffing Hershey bar after bar past his succulent lips. "Chocolate," he explains, "A basic need. One of the five food groups."

Poised to answer with a snappy comeback, I remember something and run off to throw vitamins, calcium, gingko biloba, damiana and other herbs into a basket.

"Are we going up over Whitney summit today?" Mulder asks, as we ride up into the hills.

"Not over the summit, not today or any day. Not that it's not doable; it is. It's just that, see, up there, that lower point, like a saddle almost? That's where we're going. Why end up taking more time and tiring the horses unnecessarily?"

Mulder is now working on a Baby Ruth bar. "Did you remember to buy sunflower seeds, dear?" I ask him.

"In my backpack. How long is it from here to La Honda?"

"Well," I say, considering, "it'll take us 20 hours to get through these mountains. They're really spread wide." Mulder's treacherous lip is curling up as if preparatory to a chortle. "OK, Mulder. Then, it'll take, oh, 15-16 hours from there. HARD riding, Mulder. An average of 20 mph."

"How fast do these things go?"

"You've seen for yourself! I'd guess their top speed at close to 40, maybe a little more. But they're not machines, Mulder."

"Are we crabby?" he asks, turning to me, smiling his sweet dimply smile. "I know how to fix that."

"Not in broad daylight in the middle of a wide path with hikers on it, you don't."

He reins in sharply toward me, the mare's left shoulder striking Al Marac's right, then his hand shoots out and pushes me right off the golden bay and into the dirt. As I try to sit up, I see that he's leaped from his mount to Al Marac and is dancing the stallion around me in a circle, tighter and tighter; then he is off and tackling me back to the ground.

"Hey, hey!" I shout, as my hat flies off and goes skirling down the hillside. Mulder flips me on my stomach and pins my arm behind me. There is a whistling sound as his quirt strikes me once, twice, three times on the ass. I feel the familiar stirring in my groin and moan.

"You're crabby," he laughs, "and oh, yes, I DO know how to fix that!" and his free hand is at my belt, and my jeans are being yanked down around my ankles.

"You'll never get away with this, bitch!" I say furiously.

"You have a smart mouth, Alex," Mulder says mildly, and spanks my bare rear with the quirt.

"OW!" I yell, as a hot stripe of pain runs up and down my spine. Then again he whips me, and yet again. Then I can feel his long sensitive hands parting my ass, and his cock plunging into me. "God oh God," I gasp, torn between pain and the sweetest rapture known to man. "Mulder, spank me more!"

He sits up and strikes me again with the whip. "More, more!" I beg. Then I come, and the force of it takes even me by surprise. Now he doesn't need to twist my arm back, now I am perfectly compliant as he drives into me, his own orgasm seconds behind mine, grunting and shuddering over me and into me.

We sit up. "That was intense," I say quietly. "I loved your staging, Cowboy."

"Not staged," he remonstrates. "It was all completely spontaneous. And now," he touches his lips, then mine, "get over here for a nice chocolate kiss." Hikers pass us on the trail, and except for a man who clears his throat, none comment on the oddity of the scene: two cowpokes, jeans down around their feet, kissing and fondling and murmuring endearments. The throat-clearer waits until he's 50 feet down the trail before calling out, "I thought they had cows for that."

************************************************************************

It is hours before we can cross the washes, which have become flash-floods carrying sagebrush, hunks of barbed-wire fence, even a hapless sheep which we are helpless to save as it is rushed from bank to bank on its sodden back, struggling faintly, too terrified to bleat. Eventually the torrent slows to a manageable stream and we are able to ford it. Dana says nothing, a white, shell-shocked look on her cameo-pretty face. "It's almost as though we were meant to fail," she finally ventures miserably.

"Now, how could that be? If you're talking about the Apparition, it seems that he's historically really aided and abetted us."

"I know, but maybe he's changed his mind. Maybe he wants Krycek to get away, for whatever reason I couldn't possibly say."

"I could," I say.

"What?"

"Maybe he's...oh, no, that's impossible."

"Mm?" she asks.

"Oh, nothing," I say, glumly poking at the spiderwebbed windshield.

"Yes? Come on, Monica."

"Well, it concerns the relationship that the two had in life."

"Yes? At first businesslike, then adversarial. So?....Oh, are you suggesting that there was something between them, and if so, why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"Yeah. I am, and sorry, I didn't tell you earlier. It's not generally known...even Mulder didn't learn of it until recently, I think. It's not in either Krycek's or Spender's FBI file -it's just an oral tradition, one might say."

There is the sound a baby chick makes, and then my lover bursts into laughter, whooping so loudly she wakes Will. "Oral tr-tradition!" she yelps. "Oh, I'm so sorry, baby," meaning Will. "Your sainted papa is the occasion of mirth, and that's funny!" When she has sufficiently calmed down I continue.

"I learned of it doing research into the man you refer to as the Well-Manicured Man, an associate of Spender's of course, who died helping Mulder find you in the Antarctic, murdered by his friend's people. It seems he'd had an affair with Krycek, and that this wasn't all-that-well covered up, and then when I dug deeper I found out about the Krycek/Spender connection. Really, Dana, I'm having a HARD time telling you this story with you cracking up all the time," but I am grinning, it is so good to see her smile. And Will? He is positively giggling, as if he finds it all very funny, too.

"H-how long did they...carry on?" Scully asks me.

"Oh, a LOOOOONG time," I begin, which sends her into paroxysms of laughter again.

"I'm sorry, I'm acting like a silly schoolgirl, Monica, don't mind me."

"Anyway," I continue, "as near as I could figure it, from 1993 till late 1999, when the old bastard had him thrown into prison in Tunisia. The relationship wasn't continuous, even so, and was very rocky. I examined hospital records of Krycek's ER admissions - oh, broken ribs, lacerations, a cut above the eye, even burn marks which he'd sworn, apparently, he'd received while lighting a fire in the fireplace - this was in summer - all consistent with domestic violence."

"Had he hit back, do you know?"

"No one knows, although one time he came in with badly torn knuckles."

"That's pretty diagnostic." Dana has turned back into Dr. Scully now, and was serious and scientific. "Were those the lacerations?"

"I spoke of earlier? Partly. The others were."

"What? Oh...you mean to say he was fucked too hard? Without lubricant?"

I glance at her; she's having to bite her lip. "No," she continues, "it's not funny. Not funny at all. And there was no getting away from a guy like that, and no enlisting the help of any authorities. I remember," she says softly, "one time we went out to the missile silos in North Dakota. He, he was there, arrived in a helicopter. With soldiers. How could anyone expect help from the police when the man had the U.S. Armed Forces in his back pocket? When he died, I thought Mulder and I and the world...would have some rest from him. But I, I gave him life again," and she begins now to weep silently, tear after pearly tear forming, trembling on her lashes and blinked down her cheeks. "That's what parenthood is, Monica, you give the gene, the immortal part of all of us, each subtly different, each fighting for domination, new life, new hope, new chances."

"True," I say, squeezing her hand, "it's true. But in doing so, in submitting to him against your will, you gave your OWN genes the chance. He did some kind of ovum re-implantation procedure that we don't understand very well, but that allowed you to become a mother, darling, which was the cherished hope of your life. And look at your baby! Beautiful, bright, healthy, with a wonderful personality. Just like you!"

She smiles a little. "But I'm only half the genetic contribution."

"Yes, and consider the other half. The man wasn't a monster, Dana. He had one of the highest IQs on record. He was athletic and handsome in his youth. And healthy, until he got really sick at the end, but that was from the alien brain inflammation, and the throat thing...well, smoking that much for that long will override the best genes in the world. And, Dana,"

"Yes?"

" 'nothing is evil in the beginning'."

" 'Even Sauron was not so'." She finishes softly. "But antisocial predilections have been shown to be genetic in origin," she continues.

"Yes, and so does a liking for sushi, I imagine. Doesn't mean it'll be expressed. Will's having the world's best upbringing by a lot of really lovely people."

"So did C.G.B. Spender, no doubt."

"Oh. OK, Will's going to become a psychopathic killer just like dear ol' Dad."

"I didn't say that, and you know I didn't."

Exasperated, I stop the car and turn to my galpal. "Dana," I say, "mark my words, your baby's gonna be just fine. I know you're tired and hot and soaked and cranky. So am I. I promise you, as soon as we get back to camp we'll have a long hot shower. The water in the tanks has been heating and it'll be just perfect."

"I know," she sighs. "You're right on all counts. Maybe some real food, too?"

"Definitely, some real food. Steaks and burgers and chops and..."

"Stop it, you're making me drool!" she laughs.

"Hasn't that always been the objective?"

************************************************************************

On the other side of Mt. Whitney we stop and cook the hamburgers over a campfire built of driftwood in a natural depression in the granite basin that holds up the top of the world. "We can't have too many more stops," Krycek says warily. "There's always the risk, no matter how slight, that they might catch up to us."

"Yeah, depending," I agree.

"On what?"

"On how fast they go. On where they go. On whether they even have a clue as to where we're going. On whether they sleep."

Krycek shrugs. "They could get within a mile of us without seeing us. Any closer to that, all bets are off: I just don't know. That's why we have to keep going."

"Um," I say, swallowing burger, "whatever. I could get used to this, I really could."

"Don't. We'll be in Modesto before you know it. There we'll rent a trailer and give the horses a rest."

"And us," I say.

"You mean to say that you weren't born in the saddle?"

************************************************************************

After showering and eating ham-and-turkey sandwiches on French rolls, courtesy of the solar-heated tanks and generator-run refrigerator, we both feel refreshed. Doggett has been messing with the Magellan equipment until I mention that it's the satellite, and please cut it out already; then he stomps off to gaze morosely over the desert. At least our phones work here, due to the proximity of a transmission station; and John and I can call in to D.C. Kersh is not pleased. "You're telling me that because of...witchcraft, or some such tommyrot, that you can't locate two horsemen in a big flat nothing like Nevada?"

"That's exactly correct, sir," I say evenly.

"What, has the heat fried your brains, Agent Reyes?"

"No, sir," I say patiently. "All is as I have relayed it to you, no more, no less."

"OK," he says, and all at once I'm thinking of an angry bull, and I can almost see and feel and hear the stamping and snorting and eye-rolling preparatory to the charge, and I almost flinch, "ONE WEEK, I'm giving you people ONE WEEK, then if you still don't have them, I'm sending in the military. Every town in three states should already be on full-scale alert!"

"Nuclear," I agree, trying not to sound as sarcastic as I feel. "Delta four. But it still may take more than a week. They've after all successfully eluded us for this long, seven weeks, Deputy Director."

"I don't want any excuses, Ms. Reyes! And none from Doggett and the rest of your rag-tag crew either! One more week!"

I click off and stand shaking my head at the phone. "What?" asks Dana Scully, glancing at my white-hot face.

"Fuckin' Kersh," I mutter. "The man was BORN with his head up his ass. He wouldn't know daylight if it bit him!" I walk over to Doggett, who is fiddling with his laptop.

"Kersh?" he asks, without looking up.

"Yeah," I say, kicking a pebble. It fetches up against his desert-boot-shod foot.

"Yeah, I know," he commiserates. "He's already given me the business."

"What are you doing, John?"

"Attempting to fix the satellite from here."

"Can that be done?"

"Not by me," he says, straightening up with a little "oof!" and absentmindedly dusting himself off. "I know someone who could do it, though...well, more than one someone. They're a kind of team, friends of Mulder's. Aw, it's a long shot."

"What the Sam Hill are you talking about?"

"Well, I feel a little foolish approaching them," he says, going on as though he has not heard me. "Tell you what, I'll let you know if it works."

************************************************************************

It's the "Lone Gunmen" I'm thinking of. The satellite can indeed be fixed from D.C., of course, but Kersh was rather vigorously opposed to "wasting any more Government time or money on this fucking crapshoot." The Gunmen can do it very well, and very economically - hell, they'll work for airfare and room and board and enough pin money to keep Langly in all-day suckers. We can all scrape together enough to afford their services without having to appeal to Kersh, who will, once again, hit the ceiling. I don't, of course, have any assurance that the Gunmen will be at all amenable to the idea in the first place. Considering the nature of the venture and its probable outcome, they have to be approached cautiously.

I put in a call to their "office."

"Byers," the phone is answered by their unacknowledged leader, the one of the three with marginal social skills.

"Mr. Byers, this is Special Agent John Doggett of the FBI." Might as well cut to the chase here. "Do you know who I am?"

"Yes, we do. How can I help you?"

"We've got a nonoperational communications satellite you can help us fix. You can also give us, or loan us or whatever, the technology required to be able to use our cellphones in the Sahara."

"The Sahara?"

"Oh no, actually, just the Nevada desert." And the Nevada oasis, and the Nevada prairie, and Greenbelt, and Garden Spot.

"Uh-huh. Yes, we are capable of this. Both these things. But why should we help you? You're not exactly on the side of the angels in this endeavor, so far as we can tell."

"Well, if you can help get Mulder back to us safely, we'll make sure he gets professional help, everything he needs...we'll have all charges dropped." I'm crossing fingers and toes as I say this. There is a "click" as someone picks up the extension.

"I don't believe you."

"You don't? Who is this?"

"This is Langly, dude. Why should we trust you?"

"Yeah," a third voice joins in. "You just want to imprison our friend, maybe do worse than that to him."

"Your friend, guys, is in a world of trouble, but he doesn't have to be. It's Krycek we really want to prosecute, and consider this: Krycek is a sociopath and a madman. Eventually, maybe sooner than later, he may turn on Mulder, cutting his throat in his sleep. The longer the lag between the crimes we're chasing him for and our apprehension of him, the greater that possibility becomes."

There is a confusion of voices, some muffled, some clearer as the trio seems to confer with one another. Then Byers comes back on the line. "OK, we'll do this for you, we'll help you if it'll help Mulder, but only with the guarantee that you won't prosecute."

"Yeah, and no state funny farms either. Those are pretty nasty places. I've heard," he adds hurriedly, as Byers and Frohike begin to rib him.

"I can't guarantee the latter, but I can the former; how's that?" Oh, I'm bullshitting big-time now. I'm not a D.A. or an upper-level FBI authority, am I? How can I make such warranties?

There is another hurried partially-muffled conference, and then someone (Byers?) clears his throat. "All right. In the interests of getting him away from Krycek, we agree to help you. We can re-orient the satellite from here, then we'll be on the next flight to...you're outside Elko, correct?"

"Yes, how did you...?"

"Never mind how we knew," says Langly rather rudely.

"Fly into Salt Lake City, then get a private plane to Elko and I'll meet you there."

************************************************************************

"Nice save, John," Monica Reyes remarks, smiling at Doggett. "Those guys may be nerds, but they're brilliant nerds."

"I suppose. The proof'll be in the pudding, all right."

"I've known them for ages," I offer, "and believe me, when they say they can do something, at least something in the electronic line, they mean it. How'd you ever convince them to hunt down Mulder?" Poor Mulder.

"Well," he answers, clearing his throat, "I'm not sure that I did, per se."

"You lied?" Reyes asks, a Morley Light halfway to her pouty lips.

"Not precisely," he says, moving sideways, a little, like a weasel would perhaps. "I, uh, told them that Mulder won't be prosecuted, just treated."

I look at him. "You'd better mean that, John," I say quietly. "If you don't, I'm going to call them next I can, and tell them."

He places a placating hand (the bad one; it seems to be giving him no pain these days, thank goodness!) on my arm. "Dana," he begins.

"Don't 'Dana' me! This is a man's life you're talking about here!"

"A man who's committed several felonies. One who's likely to commit several more before this grand ol' campaign is over."

"He can't help it!" I cry, shaking off the restraining arm. "He's under the constant brain-washing influence of that arch-fiend, Alex Krycek! Mulder is sensitive! He's vulnerable! And he's hurt no one, except maybe himself!"

Doggett looks to Monica for support; she blows blue smoke and folds her arms. "If your prevarications lead to an essentially innocent man being incarcerated, I'm not going to be happy about it either," she says quietly.

"Hey, he agreed to do it, to support Krycek against us, knowing full well the risks. Weighing the risks against potential benefits, you know, and remember, they're both smart guys, they can think of all the angles too."

I feel tears forming at the corners of my eyes. "If you lock Mulder up, John Doggett, I...I don't know what I'll do."

He looks earnestly into my face, touching one wet cheek gently. "Don't worry, Dana. We're going to get him back safe and sound - isn't that what you want, too? -- and we'll get him treatment. We all know he's under Krycek's sway, for one reason and another, and we don't blame him."

"Oh," I say, "don't we? What does Kersh say on the subject? That he looooves Mulder, that he'll forgive him anything, that he'll give him ticker-tape parades?"

"Haven't had time to approach him about it," he hedges. "Look, girls, um, nature calls," and he walks away toward the latrines.

"Very cagey," I remark. "He won't tell us what Kersh really said."

"Sly devil," she agrees, looking after him speculatively, cigarette lowered and gently drifting smoke.

************************************************************************

We accepted this assignment in the first place because we all agreed, in the spontaneous fashion we make these group decisions, that it would indeed be in Mulder's best interests if we help to get him back before the inevitable showdown, likely to take the form of a bloody shootout which might very well leave our friend injured or worse, and which would, if he participated - and he surely would - dig him in deeper, so deep that he'd spend the rest of his life behind bars (or heavily-screened windows). And we can't have that. Toward this aim we've started work on the Telsat project. It is a simple matter of A) establishing a connection with the damaged satellite, which we're able to do even though it's disoriented in space; B) hacking further into the code, which we will have already "broken" at that point; and C) reprogramming the faulty module.

The entire process is accomplished in a matter of a couple of hours, and a call is placed to Agent Doggett, who seems overjoyed. The cell phone problem? It's workable, but we'll have to bring out our own equipment and set it up and operate it ourselves. I don't know what kind of goons Doggett has working for him, but we don't trust them with a job this delicate.

As we talk, Langly sucking on an all-day lollipop, Frohike speaking from time to time of his lost love, Dana Scully, we hash out some other ideas we've got for the eventual safe apprehension of Mulder. None of them seem particularly promising, but the day is young.

"So rumor has it Scully's gone gay," Froggy ventures at one point.

"I don't know whether or not that's the correct way to characterize it," I amend cautiously. "She's in a relationship with Monica Reyes, but, well..." I fade off, turning back to my PC.

"But what?" Langly asks curiously, popping the red-and-white-striped sucker out of his wide mouth.

"Nothing," I say, abstractedly, "nothing."

************************************************************************

We make it through the Sierra Nevada in record time, considering the difficulty of the climb - we go up to 12,000 feet altitude in several spots, and although the horses never complain, we know it must be hard for them - and, perhaps not surprisingly, find ourselves a little tired from our exertions. Incredibly, the Arab and Akhal-Teke show no signs of tiring, going strong on a few mouthfuls of oats now and then and what they can grab along the trail (which I hope and pray is nontoxic).

"Can we stop," Mulder asks me plaintively, "for just a few minutes?"

"I want to get to Modesto by nightfall."

"Will we rent the trailer there?"

"We will, Goddess willing." A few minutes after 7 PM we stumble into Modesto. The horses are at last tired, their sides heaving, wet with foamy sweat. We rent the horse trailer and load our mounts, then drive into the night.

"Do you have to drive that fast?" Mulder asks me, yawning.

"Yes," I say briefly, "I do."

"We'll attract the attention of a highway patrolman, then it'll be all over."

I just shake my head and continue at 90 per. "Everyone drives this fast through the valley, Mulder. Look at the traffic! We'd be seriously impeding-"

"All right, all right," he says wearily, half-heartedly stifling another yawn. "You win. What would you say to my sleeping?"

"Here, now?"

"No, on Mars in the next millennium."

"No need for sarcasm," I say gently. He sighs, and then his head lolls back. He's gone for now, and I hope he has pleasant dreams.

We reach the house in La Honda at a little before 12 midnight. Mulder is still sleeping and I rouse him gently. "We're here darling. We're finally here. Get up, we'll unload the horses and put 'em in the pasture."

Mulder is so sleepy that he is not much good at this task, so I send him to the house with my keyring.

************************************************************************

The trip? We took a ride. A long, long ride, from nowhere into the unknown, into the dark, the infinite night, glowing with ephemeral lightning-bugs of streetlamps. I wake from time to time from fitful dreams, not knowing where I am or who I am, or even that I am, looking at the cracked dashboard through the windshield, a window into black nothingness, and then at Krycek, my love, steady as a rock in an unquiet ocean, hand locked to the wheel, eyes to the road, or what he can see of it - or maybe the man has night-eyes, like a cat. Just now his glance at me is both feral and protective, a mountain lion with her single cub; and there is a glint, a golden glimmer in the emerald orbs, the eyes of the wildcat within.

We pass town after rural town, flashing by in a blur of dark against velvet dark, a few lights scattered hither and yon illuminating farm houses, bank buildings, silos, the architectural effluvia of the country lifestyle, a life gone by and gone by us...not our concern, we are headed for that manse in the clouds. Sometimes the rapid passage of the landscape paired with the steady hum of the tires on asphalt lulls me into a trance-like state that is neither waking nor sleeping, but something oddly in between.

After many miles it is possible to interpret the sights as an experimental film noir offering and the sounds, that hum, as the "om," the sound at the center of existence, the wellspring of creation.

"Ommm," I hum along with it. Krycek looks at me quizzically, the cat-eyes gleaming in the dim light from the dash. "Are you all right, darling?" he asks quietly.

"Just fine," I smile back at him, touching his sinewy arm, his face, his lips. "Just thinking about what a nice time we're going to have. When we get there."

"When we get there," he repeats, sighing gently. The phrase seems to take on a strange significance, something beyond the mundane, as though I were listening to Neil Young on acid. "When we get there."

"How much farther do we have to go, anyway?"

"Oh..." he checks the clock, his wristwatch, the clock again. What, has time gone all whonky too? "Three hours or so, Mulder." Depending on whether we get pulled over for speeding, of course. "Might as well get comfy again."

"I wasn't real comfy to begin with," I bitch.

"Sounded from your singing that you were."

"I wasn't singing. Humming. Sort of."

"Well, humming, sort of, then," he says easily.

"OK," I say, and I lean back in the seat, groaning a little because even with the seat back my legs are a bit cramped, and I think, and I dream.

************************************************************************

Alex and Fox do not know it, but I have been following them, no, "shadowing" is a slightly more accurate term; at any rate, I have been accompanying them, through whatever means, silently, unobtrusively, on their wanderings. Ah, the temptation, so near Alex, to touch him, to make him know me again; but I must hold off until they reach their destination. The house in La Honda - I know it well; it was one of my own for many years - may Alex and Fox have the pleasure of it for many more. I have been told - and the telling is a process which involves not directives from an old man with a white beard, but a method of simple assimilation - that there will be...will be what my heart, and I am using the term even more metaphorically than usual, most desires, whether in the temporal realm or the etheric one. What is to become of me after that, I do not know, but I do not fear it. I have never feared death, physical death, spiritual death in any form. What is this, though? I see something very like a tear on my beloved's pretty face; yes, it is, sparkling like a dirty diamond as it rolls down his stubbly cheek. Why are you crying, Alex? You have your Mulder, your freedom; soon you will reach your destination; and that is all YOUR heart desires, is it not? No doubt you are very weary of your travels, and your travails, my love. Is that it, is that why, even as I watch, a second tear hovers for a moment at the corner of your glistening beryl eye, the true color of which I can see in the dark as well as the wolves I sometimes hear howling at the corners of my existence? It trembles, yes, and finally accedes to the tug of gravity and falls to join the first. Does this concern Fox, is it due to worry over your difficulties, to their plausible outcome; or is it simply the result of an existential crisis, the glance over the edge of the cliff, barely balanced, tottering above the yawning abyss that is your psyche - yes, I have abided there also, and I know it well - the primordial terror, yours always, though never mine, at the contemplation of nothingness; is that it, Alex? Is that why your delicate nose is beginning to run and a muffled sob rises in your throat? I know what you're thinking; I've been there, it is my home until other accommodations can be provided for me. Oh Alex, how I long to take you in my arms and rock you and comfort you as I should have done so many times before, and now cannot. Oh darling, how bitterly I regret the blows, the hurts, the abuse; the imprisonment; the mutilation. If I could take it all back, you know I would, you know I'd run the aching years in reverse and make them heal you; more, I'd take all the hurt upon myself just to spare you. Now I am powerless to comfort you as you weep, near-silently so as not to awaken the dozing Fox Mulder; and I so want to. I am sure that when my tale is told to its conclusion and I am faded into the energy matrix of the universe which gave me life, there it will remain: my love for you, like yours for Fox and his for you: undying, eternal as the sea, a solo flame, perhaps, burning bright and pure, there for eyes to see and hearts to feel that can.

************************************************************************

"So the blessed navigation system's fixed and the Gunmen are on their way to fix the cell phones and all that? Well, good and all," says Monica Reyes, lighting a Morley Light, "but the fuckin' FBI's thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We could've had them weeks ago if we'd had the kind of backup we needed, but noooo, Kersh's sticking to a BUDGET. They're already in the next state, I can feel it."

"Yeah?" I say. "Well, so say they're in California. Do you have an idea where?"

"No," she says briefly, taking a deep drag.

"Haven't I told you not to smoke till your lung function can be evaluated?" I ask her, looking pointedly at the lit Morley in her nail-chewed hand.

"I don't care," she says.

"Monica, what's eating you?"

She shakes her head, dropping her smoke to the ground and grinding it out. "I don't know. Could be PMS. I just have the horrible conviction that we've lost 'em."

"Well," I say logically, "look. Consider: where would they have gone to ground? Krycek has a string of luxury hidey-holes, all owned by the Smoking Man, who seems to have had inexhaustible wealth," (though Will and I have yet to see any of it, I think). "Isn't it the sensible thing to assume that that's where they're headed? To one of his places?"

"Oh, sure," Reyes says. "That's the first thing I thought of, of course. But a search of public records hasn't yielded anything useful, historically; why would it do so now?"

"It's worth a try, isn't it?"

"Yeah. I'll talk to John and get our associates in D.C. on it."

Doggett approaches us, shouting over his shoulder. "No, I do not think that exploding latrine was cute, Johansen! What's up, ladies?" he adds in the same breath, turning around to look at us. I can see Monica flinch. "All right, women, then," he says good-naturedly. We brief him on our discussion and he nods, frowning slightly. "I'll get someone right on the public records angle - we have half a dozen or more of the old man's aliases to try. California? That's a lot of counties. A lot of unproductive counties. LA, West Hollywood, you think?"

"I don't know," she says. "Try there, and the Bay Area and San Diego and the Tahoe area I guess. The hot spots, the glamour spots. Although, shit, it might be another fuckin' cabin in the woods and there're a whole lot of woods in California."

************************************************************************

I awaken to the smell of coffee, bacon, various frying things - all comforting scents reminiscent of my youth. "Where the fuck am I?" I ask the ceiling. It is high-pitched, vaulted really, with exposed bent beams. There is a skylight directly over me and it admits thin early-morning light, pale-golden with the promise of a beautiful summer's day.

"You're home," a voice calls from the kitchen; it's a nice voice, Alex's; and it and the fragrant air redolent of inviting warm scents beckons me into the kitchen. It's a gorgeous kitchen (why am I surprised?), grand on the scale I am beginning to become accustomed to: pink granite countertops, copper pots and garlands of garlic and bright red chile peppers, bunches of herbs hung upside-down from beams; terra-cotta tile, pickled-oak cabinetry with shiny brass fittings; four kinds of ovens, two refrigerators, baskets of jeweled fruit ("those are real citrines," he remarks proudly, pausing in his egg-flipping to watch me pick up a pear), Battenberg lace tablecloths, dishcloths, curtains, expensive-looking original oil paintings, textile hangings over grasscloth-covered walls; everything gleaming, spotless and dazzling. "Just wait'll you see the rest of the house!" he enthuses. "But in the meantime, darling, sit and eat. Those are Mimosas in the pitcher. If you'd rather have plain juice I'll get you that."

As I contemplate my plate, Lenox gold-rimmed china laden with a large Denver omelette, bacon, sausage, French toast, pancakes, I think to wonder. "Where'd you get all the food, Alex?"

He laughs. "Webvan. Probably their last delivery, too, before they went belly-up. Mulder, you've got to understand. You've been asleep for a whole day. We're on the second morning since we got here. You were very tired, sweetheart. Now I'll make like a Jewish mama and tell you to eat, eat!"

I dig into the sumptuous repast, decorating the French toast with real maple syrup, the pancakes with sweet butter from a ceramic crock and homemade blackberry jam. "From a nearby farm," he explains.

"This is the nicest place yet, Alex."

"Hoho, this is nothing," he scoffs. "Just wait'll you see the screening room!"

Well, I run out of superlatives as we walk from room to elegant room, and after a few tries am effectively stricken dumb. Yes, here is the private theater, the TV's flat panel display encompassing one whole wall. "We used to run skin flicks. He'd watch while I sucked him off." Now, this is information I didn't really need, but I indulge him. Here are the bedrooms, of which mine was only one of eight, and bathrooms ("7.5"); here are the living rooms, den, study, library, music room. I am bewildered by all the luxury, the excess. Everything is lavishly appointed, every room out of Sunset or House Beautiful.

"Is that really a Vermeer?" I ask, gazing at a crackled old oil of a young woman.

"Yes," he says. "Like it?"

"Jesus," I say, with feeling. I am shown the pools, one indoor, one out; both heated; the hot tub, Jacuzzi ("and one in every bathroom," he points out, "except for the maid's rooms. Not wanting to inflame her desires, that sort of thing," he murmurs.) I am quite impressed with the basketball, racquet and tennis courts; there is even an obstacle course for the horses, and an exercise track. Near the end of the tour I am feeling a little dizzy.

"Are you all right?" he asks me.

"Yeah...it's all too much..." I sing, badly, under my breath, "...for me to take, the love that's shining all around you," he continues in a rich baritone.

"Now come with me to the deck...See," he adds, indicating with a sweep of his hand, the heart-stopping view of hillside and cliffside and in the distance, the ocean; the air is so clear I can almost see the surf, every wavelet small and perfect.

"I feel as though...as though I'd been rescued from deep water, that I'm finally able to come up for air," I say softly.

"I know, it's beautiful, isn't it?"

"It would be worthless, devoid of interest, though, Alex, if you weren't in it."

"Thanks," he says huskily, hugging me as best he can. The morning's quiet is broken suddenly by birdsong, a mockingbird, I think with wonder, then the harsh call of a jay; and finally, far off, a horse's whinny.

"Oh, my God," he says suddenly, and turns to me, and his face is white.

************************************************************************

"We're happy you're able to join us," says Frohike, lifting the tent flap to admit Agents Doggett, Reyes and Scully (and baby). "Come in, come in!" We've stuffed the Army tent full of computers and every bit of diagnostic equipment we could haul with us; it is hooked up to the generator outside, which is humming away merrily. The trio, and baby, stands and sits as they wish, looking at the Monster, as we call our best PC, and at us.

"All right," I say, "this is what we've discovered. We did a cursory search of Nevada newspapers, websites and email addresses looking for anything, anything at all unusual, out of the ordinary, applying our multi-variate, actually sort of an infinite-variate formula, something similar to the formulae actuaries use, but infinitely more complex, which scans articles and mail and looks for exceptions."

"Exceptions?" Reyes asks. The chewed fingers of her right hand creep continually toward her shirt pocket, and Scully, freeing up a hand from time to time by holding the baby with one arm, continually slaps them back.

"Yeah," Langly says. "It's a beautiful formula, dude," he continues, despite the fact that Reyes is female, "Froggy and I developed it in our spare time."

I clear my throat. "Of course, it would not work without the substrate I invented some years ago."

"Ah," says Reyes, trying to look as though she understands, or even cares, while the hand, not wanting to be smacked, strays cunningly toward her face, alights there for a moment and inches its way to the top of her head, which is scratched.

"Don't let them snow you with all the doubletalk," says Frohike, eyeing Reyes lasciviously, although I have assured him many times she is Not in the Market for a Man. "It's a simple AI - artificial intelligence - program. That means that the computer is 'taught' to look for and examine and make decisions about particular chunks of information, in somewhat the same fashion as a human would do those things. The program containing the formula is run concurrently with the AI software, so that the computer 'knows' what to check for."

"Yes," I agree, "and the upshot of all this is that we found a clue."

Doggett, Scully and Reyes are leaning forward, tense, fascinated, listening.

"Yes," I continue, wanting to tell the whole story but suspecting it would bore these nice folks, "we looked for anomalies and found one -- a man advertising in a Bishop paper, which is on the California border - the advertisement is on the Web - that he found a 'bay gelding of Barb type, with black points and zebra stripes on the hocks and cannons, wandering down a side street.' "

"Krycek allegedly had a horse just like that," says Doggett, eagerly.

"But there must be many such," rejoins Scully.

"Yeah, dude," says Langly, "but check this out!" He indicates a monitor screen, softly glowing in the semi-gloom of the tent. "We've got the Web site up. Pictures! And look at the close-up of the horse's neck."

They look, and Reyes, the horsewoman, gasps. "Freezemarked! The horse is freezemarked!"

"Yeah," says Frohike, "AMA44127199 - we ran it through all the registry databases and-"

"And it's the mustang Tigger, owned by one Alexei Krycek." I finish. They are visibly stunned.

"How could Krycek make such a dumb mistake?" asks Scully, slowly. "I don't get it."

"He was tired, sleep-deprived. Anyone could make that kind of error with enough drag on the brain," Doggett says. "Or maybe, just maybe the little prick was just arrogant enough to think he could get away with it, leaving an obvious clue like that."

"So now we know they are, or were, in Bishop. Probably went up by Whitney, then," muses Reyes, and this time her hand, neglected by Scully, who is jiggling a baby who is making pre-crying noises, creeps to her pack of Morleys and positively fastens upon it.

"Yes, and whither then?"

"I think it depends upon their conveyance," I say politely.

"Oh," says Scully, kissing Will. "You mean they might have left their other horses somewhere, maybe around there, and taken a car?"

"It could be," says Doggett. "In fact, I'm liking the idea more and more."

************************************************************************

"What?" I ask Krycek, who continues looking at me oddly.

"Have I sprouted a second head?" I ask, irritably.

"Not to joke, Mulder. I made a big mistake!"

"I don't get it. Care to clue me in?"

"Tigger." He says. "Tigger was freezemarked, a type of brand on the top of the neck under the mane done with liquid nitrogen, a way of identifying horses with a unique combination of letters and numbers. The Mustang registry has his number. I wasn't thinking. His mane is so long and I just didn't think to look."

"Does this mean they can trace you, as the registered owner or whatever?"

He nods slightly and then flops down into an Adirondack chair, weathered grey redwood like the deck itself, upholstered in blue silk jacquard; and putting his feet up on the railing, he motions for me to sit. "Only to my southern Utah address. That part doesn't scare me. The fact that the horse is like a beacon, drawing them on into California, and on that route for Chrissakes, really does."

"What are the chances of them finding the horse?"

"I don't know," he says warily. "I had a dream last night about those three nerds, those friends of yours, the Lone Gunmen, remember them?"

"Remember? I think about 'em all the time!"

"What if someone else has been thinking about them? What if they've enlisted their aid?"

"They'd never take part in any action against me," I say confidently, and I mean it.

"I dunno," he says, shaking his head. "It might be time for another ritual."

************************************************************************

I know that Alex and Fox are in danger but am powerless to help them at the moment, because I am presently inhabiting the body of a fox, near their domicile, yes, but I might as well be on Rigel Three for all the good I can do them. I cannot, for example, summon another hail storm or other natural disaster to impede their foes. Now, trotting out of the redwood forest onto the cultivated grounds of what was once my showpiece home, if I could be said to have had such, given my great need for privacy and secrecy, I see them lighting candles and supplicating their notion of the Great Spirit, which I suppose is as good as any other a mortal can devise, for protection from their enemies. A sudden chill breeze from the east, uncommon for these late-summer days with the fog usually blowing in from the coast, blows the candles out; they will find that that is a very bad omen. I bear down hard and squeeze my spirit, my essence out into the world once more so that it can roam freely and effect change in the temporal environment of the living. The candles are lit again, and the ritual begins anew; but this time I am with them, part of all of it, as it were.

"Great Mother, giver of bounty to the needy, protectress of the threatened of harm, keep our enemies from us!" This time, I see that he has little plastic figurines representing each member of the search party, and he is burying them head-down in a tub of sand. "Do not come near! Approach us not! Be confused, be harmed in your efforts! Lie beneath the sands of your own confusion! Your pursuit is unsuccessful!" Raising an athame, his ceremonial dagger, he cuts himself slightly and holds his arm over the sand pit, dropping wetly and redly into the sand. I can see that Fox is startled, maybe shocked by what Alex is doing and saying, but he does not interfere. He merely watches, and this he should not do.

Alex stirs the sand slightly, mixing in the blood, and chants in a terrible voice, "May the gods visit you disaster! May you swim in your own blood!" Alex, Alex, has it come to this, that your white magic darkened to black, that you have become a servant of the Outer Being? Oh, beware, beware, for anything you wish upon another will come back to you. It will come back!

************************************************************************

I'm having a dreadful dream, involving water and quicksand. I'm sinking, sinking and there is no escape. Monica stands nearby, safe from the sucking sand, looking disdainfully at me, coldly. "Monica! Monica! Help me!" I shout, and then, "Mulder! Mulder! Help me, Mulder!" It is no use; my head is drawn beneath the surface of the sand-pond. I have no breath with which to scream, my heart is thudding painfully. The terrible impulse is to breathe, breathe, but I know I can't, and my lungs are burning fiercely. Then I am rocking back and forth, and it is Monica, shaking me awake.

"Wake up, precious," she says urgently, peering at me. "You must have had one god-awful dream!"

"Oh, I did!" I wail, and start to blubber.

Her strong and limber arms go around me. "It's OK, it's OK," she soothes. "Nothing can hurt you now, you're safe."

"Are you sh-sure? It was so r-real," I stutter.

"I'm sure, baby. I'll just hold you till the dream goes away."

"You were in my dream."

"Was I?" she asks.

"Yeah, a-and I w-was sinking into qui-quicksand and you w-wouldn't h-help me."

She holds me tighter. "I'm so sorry, darling. You understand that if it ever really happened to you, I'd be there for you, don't you?"

"Y-yes," I say, "yes, I do."

************************************************************************

Using the anomaly function and AI emulator, we are able to determine that a horse trailer was purchased near Modesto two days ago. When Doggett's men interviewed the seller, a dealer in many such vehicles, they discovered that a man matching Krycek's description, except for the hair color, was the buyer, that he was accompanied by a reddish-haired man otherwise looking exactly like Mulder (rather a feeble attempt at a disguise, we agreed), and that they needed to trailer "two Arabs", one an "unusual buckskin color." He further said that they'd taken off north on Highway 99. Krycek's driver's license identified him as an "Albert Craig," of Cedar City, Utah; the proprietor didn't ask to see Mulder's as "Mr. Craig" told him he'd do all of the driving. Doggett immediately places a revised APB on "that trailer," and the two men, and thanks us for our help.

"We're not done yet," I remind him.

************************************************************************

Immediately after the ritual I am suffused with energy, and as I place my hand on Mulder's cheek, a visible spark leaps from me to him.

"Damn!" he whispers, then his lips are engaged with mine, cog to cog, gear to gear and oh! What a hard-on I have! I raise the athame. Mulder doesn't flinch as I cut through his clothes, slicing through the stretchy T-shirt fabric and then the tougher denim of his jeans. I push him face-down on the chaise lounge, then I unzip and pull my own jeans off; and then I am rubbing against him, my straining-hard cock almost angrily desiring entry.

"Fuck me!" he begs, "oh please fuck me!" I pull his head up by the dark roots and slap his face. "You don't tell me what to do! Lie down and be still!" He obeys me wordlessly and the thrill of pleasure that has begun at the base of my spine begins rapidly to travel up my backbone. When it reaches my brain, I know I'll be completely out of control. I slide a finger up him, then another. He shivers and groans but does not speak.

"You are so tight," I whisper, and plunge into him, dry, my cock scraping him, rubbing him, and I can feel him holding me, loving me and it and wanting more, more and I push in deeper, deeper and then he screams, "Alex! Alex!" and he is coming all over the chaise lounge and I am coming inside him, crying out, "Bitch! I love you! I love you!"

We are lying together in the chaise, limbs entwined, necking and petting like teenagers at a drive-in. "We're hard again," he observes, and indeed we have become so. Moving so that I am on top of him, I rub my cock against his, slowly at first and then faster and faster, and then we're both coming, shuddering and moaning and spurting hot sticky liquid onto each other's bellies and into the thatches of dark pubic hair. Oh, this is too good, and I never want it to end. When Mulder expresses a desire to fuck me, I gladly acquiesce, kneeling by the chaise, bending over it so that I am cracked and ready. Oh God, that huge cock, sperm-lubed, pushing into me, and the hand rubbing my member till it's throbbing and all I want is release, and then I come in a shower of sperm and Mulder is moving faster and I can feel him tense and tense till he is palsied, and then the mighty groan as he shoots deep within me.

"Had enough?" he whispers to me.

"No," I say hoarsely. "Fuck me more."

"Slut," he says harshly, and then his belt is whistling through the air and landing with a stinging slap on my ass. "And double-slut!" and the belt finds purchase once more. Then he shoves into me, hard, and I come immediately, almost weeping it is so exquisite. I can hear his hard-driving orgasm right behind mine and feel him shake and know that at this instant, which seems to stretch into eternity, I am transformed, I am a being of light, hurtling across the universe at unimaginable speed yet somehow staying right here, right now as the love of my life screams and snarls like a wild beast.

"There," he pants, "will that do it?"

"For now," I say, gasping, "for now."

************************************************************************

I'm really glad I made the decision to bring the Gunmen in. Kersh promised us a week; that was two days ago. We have only five left, but I feel that we may actually be closing in on our prey. They are smart, these "Gunmen," and thanks to them and their "anomaly function," (don't ask me, I flunked calculus) we have another clue: cell-phone transmissions, recorded going from one part of Monterey to another of this fair city, traced to originations belonging to "Arthur Kramer" and Fox W. Mulder. They'd split up for some reason and called each other, probably reading faggot love poems to each other, or something. Sloppy, sloppy Krycek. You should have used pay phones like normal people; you shouldn't have called at all. Monterey. I call to revise the APB, to include all coastal towns from San Luis Obispo to Arcata. Then a call to the Bureau to requisition a large force of agents to search exhaustively (and probably exhaustingly!) between these two points, with special attention paid to the Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz and San Francisco Peninsular areas. We're closing in, we'll get them, and when we do I will personally beat the living crap out of Krycek. I will cuff him and force him into the car, I will make him confess, oh yes, Mr. Brave Albert Craig Arthur Kramer Krycek, we heff vays; and I will testify against him at the trial which will result in his being put away for life, at the least. Mulder? Oh, God, I hate to think about THAT thorny little problem!

I'm sworn under oath to bring him to justice, too, of course...but the look on Dana Scully's pretty little woebegone face! She's still carrying a mighty flaming spitting torch for him, I know, and I promised to get him placed in treatment. Dana, Dana. You're an expert and seasoned agent. You know very well that he'll have to undergo the same legal process as anyone else, and that this may well result in his going to prison. I really don't know of any particular disorder that would cause his specific pattern of behavior, do you? He's not bipolar or schizophrenic, or even particularly depressed, that I know of; he's not on any drugs; he's not brain-damaged or demented.

"What are you muttering to yourself, John?" It's Monica Reyes, sitting down companionably on a log with me, lit Morley in hand. "If you're talking about Mulder, I'd say that he's a classic borderline case. If you ask me, and even if you don't," she continues, tapping a cylinder of ash onto the desert hardpan.

"Maybe," I say, "but it's not much of a legal defense, is it?"

"Exacerbation with psychosis is," she points out calmly.

"Mulder's not psychotic and you know it."

She shrugs, an exaggerated gesture, her small but shapely chest rising and falling with her shoulders. "Who's to say? What he did, running off with Krycek in the first place, after Krycek'd had a gun on him, that was pretty crazy."

"Yeah," I say unwillingly.

She takes my arm. "Look, bud, you promised my girlfriend that you'd get him back safe and sound and into treatment, and if you don't, you'll have to answer to me." It is a tough ultimatum delivered by a tougher broad, but I smile.

"You know I'll do my best, Monica."

"You'd better make shit-sure of that."

"Is that a threat? What'll you do to me, hit me with your crystal ball?"

Her face darkens in anger. "Look, I'm sorry, I promise to do my best, Monica. I'm not God. What else can I do?"

"You hate Mulder," she says suddenly, standing up and throwing her cigarette to the ground.

"That's not true."

"Sure it is. When he was returned by the aliens, when he recovered, as it were, he went right for you, knocked you down."

"My personal feelings about Mulder do not color this investigation or its outcome," I say defensively.

"They'd better not. He and Dana were the two best agents the Bureau's ever had and you know it. Yes, they've both officially resigned, but Dana's here and she did some work for you in an independent capacity, so they count. They COUNT, John. And it was Krycek who shot you so painfully, not Mulder."

"Mulder silently approved."

"How can you say that?"

"Because he left with Krycek, didn't he, and he was not under any sort of duress."

"John, there may have been other forces at work, forces that Krycek could - and can -command and harness and put to work in a crisis situation."

"Oho, this brings us back to the witchcraft thing. Well, I didn't see him lighting candles or chanting mumbo-jumbo to the voodoo gods or anything like that."

She sighs, lighting another cigarette. "He doesn't even need the props, John, although I imagine they're useful."

"Oh, he can just wish it and make it so? Like God? Then why doesn't he wish us away, or something?"

She gives me a strange look. Then, "John, really, I'm tired of this argument. Just please go easy on Mulder if - when - you do catch him. That's all I ask."

************************************************************************

"So," I say, "when does this spell or whatever take effect?"

He twitches his eyebrows. "Anytime. Who's to say it hasn't already?"

"You didn't hurt Scully, did you?"

Krycek sits up and stretches. "Still kinda sweet on her, aren't you? I stuck her in the sand like the others."

I am shocked. "How could you?"

"Hurt Scully? Stoop to black magic? Which?" he asks, rising to his feet and picking up a velour robe the exact color of his eyes. "Very easily. You've got to get that I'll do anything to avoid capture or harm. Anything, Mulder. Now I'll go get us some breakfast."

I lie down again, the bed moving gently. Maybe there was nothing to his spell after all. It's just his particular, not to mention peculiar, delusion that he thinks his silly craft actually works magic. It's psychotic and it's unrealistic, just a little bit like my running off with him in the first place. Then I think with a pang of the "glamour."

************************************************************************

Upon news of the possible sighting, Monica and I are immediately dispatched to Monterey. We question gas station operators, restaurant employees, Asilomar workers in Pacific Grove, Monterey, Seaside, Carmel, with one possible sighting that doesn't pan out to much; that's it. As we travel up the coastal Highway 1, Will in his car seat, gurgling and cooing, I turn to him, talk to him in that private mother-baby language consisting mostly of vowels, and give him some apple juice to drink. "Ask him where they are," says Monica casually, and I freeze.

"No, seriously, ask him."

I look into Will's eyes, so blue, so innocent, and he looks into mine. Then he gently spits up his apple juice. "Where are they, darlin'?" I ask hesitantly.

"Ooo," he says, and waves little starfish hands around.

"Do you know where, sweetheart?"

"O," he says, and chortles.

"It's no use," I sigh. "That...thing...isn't around."

"No, I get the impression he's had a change of heart and will no longer help us. The vagaries of ghosts."

"Duh," I say impatiently. "Do you see any genius falcons around?"

Monica ignores me. "If he's with Mulder and Krycek, he could well be helping them in their endeavors, so much so that we may never find them. I'd say that you have to prepare yourself for that eventuality."

************************************************************************

Sunflower seeds. Sunflower seeds! They're all over the fuckin' place, as though someone had tried to plant a sunflower forest in the velvet sofa in the den, the Tabriz runner in the hall, and most insidiously, in the waterbed's coral-colored down comforter. One of them could pop the waterbed cover, then there'd be hell to pay. I walk and stoop, picking up spat-out hulls, whole seeds. Mulder. He's such a slob! Sometimes it's almost hard to love him. Sometimes. I pause in my labors; a hand rests on my shoulder. "Get the vacuum cleaner out, Mulder," I say without looking up. "I'm going to make you clean this up!"

"I would if I could," comes the voice. A voice from the past, oh yes. I straighten up, looking unwillingly in its direction. Thank God there's no one there. I have an overactive imagination. That's what my mother, fair and doomed Svetlana Nikolayevna, said to me often; and it's true.

"No, I'm not a figment of your 'overactive imagination'. I'm me, myself, and I'm here."

"Well," I say, "have you ever considered being 'you, yourself' somewhere else? This house has all the tenants it needs, thank you."

"Funny, Alex. But this isn't funny: I'm here to warn you."

"Warn me of fuckin' what?"

"Of dabbling, more or less, in black magic."

"Well, what's it to you?"

"I love you, Alex, whether you believe me or not; I've had a change of heart about you; and I don't want to see you come to any harm, which you surely will if you cast spells designed to hurt or kill. You know the law of karma, the Wiccan Rede, as well as anyone: the energy you dispel into the universe will come back to you."

"So?" I ask sullenly. "For one thing, you're a fine one to be talking about karma, aren't you? And for another, don't you think I can handle whatever comes back, if indeed it does? And why am I bothering to have this purposeless conversation with a disembodied ghost over some obscure philosophical principle, anyway?" I start to turn away but strong "hands" recapture me, one on each shoulder, and push me, hard, against the wall. There is the slightest suggestion of a finger, touching my cheek, running down my throat, then the silken touch of lips on mine. He's kissing me!

"Hey!" I say, "hey!" but my cries are muffled as he kisses me deeply. Oh, this is mortifying, and worse; I can't get free of him. A hand pulls up my shirt, plays with my chest, my nipples, tugging on them till I moan involuntarily, and yes, I am hard, I am extremely hard; and I am wondering how I'm going to manage getting it on with a ghost. The hand, as if in anticipation of my wonderment/befuddlement/desire, slides under my shorts and down to get my cock. "Oh, God," I murmur, while the other hand grabs my ass hard and plays with it, slipping a finger inside. My cock is stroked, I am finger-fucked, and I come in about ten seconds, squirting a hot load of goopy stuff into my jeans.

"What a mess," I mutter, but weakly. He laughs.

"I love you so much, my darling," he says, kisses me again, and is gone. Of course, Mulder chooses just this exact moment to wander in, dismembering yet another sunflower seed.

"What was that?" he asks. "I heard voices."

He looks at me: sweating, shaking, my clothes in disarray, a spreading damp patch on my jeans. "What the hell happened to you?"

I try to smile. "I was molested by a ghost."

He gapes at me, mouth open, astonished. "So he's back."

"Yeah, he's back. Mulder, he kissed me, jacked me off. I couldn't see him but I could sure feel him, you know?"

"Wow!" Mulder says. "He really wants you, Alex. You know, he wants you so much that he's...partially reconstituted. Manifested. Like a poltergeist."

"Yes," I agree, skinning out of my jeans and shorts. "Let's take a shower, Mulder." In the shower, amid torrents of steaming water and bubbles from the shower gel he's so liberally applied, Mulder pushes me up against the tiled wall and takes me, slowly, so as to achieve maximum penetration and pleasure for both of us. Then he turns me around, kneels and sucks me off.

"There's no competition," I say, smiling.

"Sure there is," he says. "I'm competing with an apparition. Yeah, I'm jealous of a ghost," he adds, soaping his cock. "Alex, I'm really getting a hard-on here. Do me a big favor and fuck me."

I shove him against the wall and go after him aggressively, driving into him hard. "Oh," he says, drawing a deep breath, then he comes, streaking the wall with his seed, calling my name. Then it's my turn. I tighten and release, spurting hotly into my lover's ass.

Toweling off, I glance at him. "Spell time," I say.

He groans. "This is beginning to be a chore! What's it this time?"

"You'll see." I arrange my candles, incense and other paraphernalia and begin to chant. "Cu-chulainn, Jack of the Green, Dionysius, Hermes, Loki..." A wind springs up and extinguishes the candles.

"Not a fuckin-gain," he curses. I go to the windows, but they are locked. Krycek shouts, "Hey!" and I look back. The candles are strewn about the room, broken, as is the chunk of onyx; a picture of someone who looks a lot like John Doggett flies up, a window unlocks itself and opens, and despite my frantic motions to capture it, it floats out in the redwood darkness.

************************************************************************

I call bars, grocery stores, gas stations, anyone who might have seen the Mulder/Krycek retinue; and we turn up a bunch of negatives; although at one Apple Jack's Saloon in a little puissant backroadsy place called La Honda, we get a few curious stares, and the bartender, a silver-haired red-faced gent looking not unlike St. Nick, seems relieved to have us leave.

"Nothing," says Johansen. "Nada. They're suspicious of city slickers, nothing more."

I am compelled to report to Doggett, who has moved his base of operations to Monterey, that we've found absolutely nothing of note. What I don't tell him is how sick to death I, Johansen, Thornton and the field agents are of this ridiculous, pointless manhunt. We'll never find them. Krycek and his brutal master aren't in the public records. ANYwhere. And Krycek himself is as slick as a rat, dodging us here and there, going to ground in any of his zillion hidey-holes. The Lone Gunmen, bless their pointed little nerdy heads, have performed searches of all the available data banks, and some that weren't; and they've turned up zilch. We are so near, so very near, I can almost taste them; and yet so frustratingly and infuriatingly far. As I phone in the report, Johansen talks idly to a young punky-looking waiter, green spikes and all, who has left the cool recesses of Moe's eatery to come out for a smoke. Glancing over at them I notice Johansen pulling out the "wanted" posters and old FBI headshots from a file. And I notice the face of the youth; it changes; he almost flinches, and then he shakes his head emphatically, no.

"I have to go," I tell Doggett. "Something mighty hinky." The young man, if that's a concise definition of what he is, looks at me with trepidation. "Are you gonna bust me?" he asks.

"Not so far as I know," I answer. "Have you done anything illegal?" Probably smokes a little dope, I think, looking at his piggy eyes, which are red. He is young, maybe 22; although I'm not the best judge of age; since I hit 26 everyone looks like a kid to me. "Johansen," I prompt, "show him the pics." I reach for the file folder. Rapidly sifting through pictures, copies of handwritten letters, signatures, etc., I pull out a photo. "Have you ever seen this man?" I ask.

He stares at the photo then shakes his head, but his arm is visibly trembling as he hands it back to me. He's way too young to have Parkinson's. "He has many aliases," I say casually, "but his real name seems to be something like C.G.B. Spender." The youth starts, shakes some more. "Yes," I persist, homing in for the kill, "He's well over six feet, chain-smokes Morleys. You can't miss him. Recall ever seeing anyone like that?"

"No," he whispers.

"Would you like to come to our offices for further questioning?" He winces.

"Yeah, I've seen him before," he says unwillingly. "He was just passin' through."

"Do you know where he lives? Around here, or anywhere?"

The kid shrugs, drops his cigarette to the tarmac. "I've gotta get back inside. My break's nearly over."

"Was the other man, this one, Alex Krycek," I say, handing the picture of a surly Krycek to him, "was he with him when you saw him?"

"Y-yeah. The young guy, Krycek, was all over the old guy."

"Fighting, you mean, or sexually, as lovers would be?"

"Yeah, two queers or whatever, didn't catch their names. I just served 'em breakfast, man."

"Were you under the impression that they lived here or were just tourists?"

"Well, I'd never seem 'em before. They were new to me, an' I've lived here all my life."

" 'K," I say, and let the poor kid go. There's a voicemail on my cell phone; it's from Doggett, informing me that the Lone Gunmen have discovered another anomaly: a horse trailer abandoned at the beach near San Gregorio, registered to one "Albert Craig." Sloppy, sloppy Krycek! What's gotten into him? I call Doggett immediately.

"Yeah," he says calmly. I hear the "pop" of a can of Coke opening. "I've got people swarming all over it. Of course, the local police beat me to it, but what can I say? Learn anything?"

"Well," I say, "I interviewed someone with a positive ID for Krycek and the Smoking Man, but years ago, unfortunately."

"Got his name, checked him out?"

"Not yet, but I will."

"Anything more recent than that?"

"I'm sorry, no."

************************************************************************

The third place on our portion of the list is an old farm, abandoned old tractor sitting in a weed-choked yard. "Jesus Christ!" I swear. "Another one! False alarm - the power was turned off yesterday! I swear to God!"

Dana Scully is close behind me, Will in a Snugli. "It's OK, Monica," she says, placing a placating hand on my shoulder. "It's really OK."

"No," I say, "it's not. But it'll have to do, as it's the only reality we've got."

The fourth stop is a big frame house in San Gregorio, across the street from a general store advertising "Open Mic Night on Fridays and Saturdays," and from which already issues music and loud drunken voices. A small elderly man answers the door.

"Hi, my name is Agent Reyes, FBI, and this is Agent Scully. We're looking for these two men," I say, holding up their pictures. "Mind if we look around?"

He shrugs. "Hey, knock yourselves out," he says. We search the house and grounds and of course turn up zilch.

"Don't get discouraged," Scully says, in the car. "We've still got six to go, then there're all the houses they're looking for," she adds, jerking her head in the direction of the passenger window. "We'll find 'em."

************************************************************************

"Alex?"

"Hmm?"

"What was all that about sticking those dolls in a bucket of sand?"

"Nothing," he says, stretching, and the waterbed sloshes slightly. "Just a ritual, Mulder."

"Were you trying to hurt people?"

"Naw. I wasn't, and anyway, don't bother your sweet pretty little head about it."

"Alex, don't shit me. You were trying to do some damage there."

"Who would have wanted to damage us," he points out, looking at me with those huge limpid green pools of eyes, those eyes that could launch a thousand ships...I can swim, drown in those eyes. "Darling," he says softly, looking at me with those eyes, THOSE EYES, "I'll do anything to protect you."

"But it's you they're hunting down like a mad dog."

"But you, my sweet, my lovely, would get caught in the crossfire. And if you're still alive after all is said and done, they'll arrest your gorgeous ass and stick you in a hole so deep and dark you'll never see daylight again. We can't have that."

"But I can't have you hurting Scully, either.

"Oh all right," he says indifferently, standing up and yawning. "I'll pull her out. But IF I perceive any danger from her, back she goes!" He walks into the background, chest a bit puffed out, arrogant ass that he is (MY arrogant ass!), from whence I shortly hear a sort of squawk.

"What is it?" I call.

"Oh God," he moans, "oh God oh God," and this time it isn't from sexual ecstasy. He is staring fixedly at the mirror. I look: no, no stray globs of Crest or anything else that could give him fits. "In the mirror!" he hisses.

"Alex, I can't see a damned thing, except your pretty face. And my ugly one," I add, rubbing a swollen eyelid (from a mosquito bite?)

"Look! Look!" he cries, pointing, transfixed.

"What, darling?"

"Me...my arm! Oh, my God!"

"What?" I ask again, stupidly.

"My ARM, dickhead!"

"Your arm looks fine to me."

"No! No! The other arm," and he paws frantically at his left shoulder.

************************************************************************

Mulder must think I've gone completely bonkers this time, for he of course sees nothing but the same old me: what is real, in his reality. But who's to say what's real to me? The pain, the blood and the mostly-severed arm: these agonies are so immediate, so compelling that I might be experiencing the forced amputation a second time. "God, Mulder," I gasp, "get me to a fuckin' hospital! I'm bleedin' to death!"

He catches me up in his arms, shaking me. "Alex, get ahold of yourself!"

"Mulder, can't you see! Ouch, you're touching it!"

He looks at me, picks up the heavy marble soapdish and smashes the mirror. The illusion is gone. "I guess I was hallucinating," I say shakily, looking at myself, the shoulder, the stump, all healed years ago.

"I guess you were," he says. "Alex, do you have any...um, Mellaril, that sort of thing, hanging around?"

"No," I say, running my hand through my sweat-soaked hair. "Should I?"

"No," he says, "look, we'd better get you to a doctor, I think."

"I'll be fine," I respond. "I just saw something in the mirror. If you want I'll take a Valium. I have plenty of those."

"That doesn't help someone who's psycho - who's hallucinating."

"I'm not psychotic and I'm not hallucinating...not now, am I?"

"I don't kno...you tell ME!" He leaves the room, coming back with a heavy Pink and White Pages.

"No, oh no," I say, backing away.

He says nothing but flips around in the business pages, then picks up the phone to dial. "Hello, Dr. Rosenblum. My name is..." and I irritably yank out the wall line.

"OK," says Mulder with a hurt look and goes out on the deck, no doubt to use his cell phone. "OK," he repeats, coming back in, "called the ER and they want to see you right away. Stanford, Krycek. Is that around here?"

"Jesus Christ, Mulder," I say, exasperated. "It's 30 minutes from here, that's flyin', and anyway I won't go."

He looks at me oddly for a moment, then walks up with a smile. He is fiddling with something in his pocket, and as he brings his hand out he's reaching over and grabbing me with his right, and suddenly I'm cuffed to the wrought-iron bed. "I'll drive," he says nonchalantly.

As soon as he's cuffed me his hand is in a shirt pocket, from whence he withdraws a syringe. "Ativan IM," he says. "I found it in one of the many powder rooms. You were mainlining the stuff, Alex?"

"Mulder," I say warningly, and the needle goes in my upper arm, quick and clean as you please. "Mulder. Your ass is basically grass, Mulder," only it comes out more like "grash."

"No, it isn't. Now how do we get to Stanford?"

"Why didn't you ask for directions, asshole? Or get fuckin' MapQuest?"

In a fog, I notice Mulder unsnapping the cuff from the bed and clipping it to his wrist, and he half-carries, half-drags me to the door. "Hey," I say weakly, and he supports me to the passenger side, back seat. Looking at the Porsche, I think of its original driver and I am seized with fits of giggles, collapsing against the side of the car. Mulder opens the door and starts to load me; I fall forward onto my face and laugh afresh. Grimly silent, he unclasps the handcuff and plants a knee in my butt. Once I am in, howling now with unspent laughter, he cuffs me to the arm rest, testing it first for solidity, though he needn't have bothered; I've had this treatment before, or something very similar, and I know it will hold; then he gets in and guns the Porsche's mighty engine to life. I laugh all the way up the hill to Skyline and all the way down the hill to 280, down the highway to Quarry Road, into the Stanford Medical Center Emergency Room; and then, at the listing, staggering entrance to the ER door, I fall silent. And no wonder: I am bleeding again.

It isn't bad; not nearly so bad as I might have supposed. They want to keep me overnight "for observation," but after another blessed shot, this one Zyprexa or some such, the sensation that I am opened and bleeding and hauling around a partially-severed arm has left me, and Mulder, carrying a prescription for more Zyprexa, loads me back into the car and drives me home. I wake up sometime during the night and invoke the war gods in my struggle against my enemies.

When I am finished, I am drained and shaking. I stand up facing the full moon. There is a soft footfall, and Mulder's arms go around me. "Darling Mulder," I murmur, and turn my face to be kissed.

"It isn't Mulder," he says.

************************************************************************

I've made my deal. I agree to submit to whatever outcome The Powers That Be deem fair, even though it be oblivion, for a few hours with my love, in a physical body that can experience all the delights the temporal realm has to offer. How lovely, and how appropriate, that it be my son's own beautiful youthful one. Alex glances back at me; oh that look: a glimpse of heaven as he smiles at me and submits to my caresses. Young men are wonderful works of engineering, Mulder even more so than most, and I'm hard now, marvelously hard within seconds after that first embrace.

"It isn't Mulder," I tell him, and his sweetly compliant body stiffens. "Relax, darling, it's just me. I won't hurt you."

"Wh-what do you want?"

"Only you, Alex. It was always you."

He turns to face me. "It's really you? You're what, sharing Mulder's body?"

"Sharing it with you, sweetheart. Look," I continue, "I brought a blanket," and I spread it out under the trees. "This is a beautiful place, isn't it?"

He looks at me and he swallows. Then the tears come.

"It's OK, it's OK," I say, and catch him up again in my arms - Mulder's strong arms. Poor Alex, his shoulders are shaking and now he's sobbing all his hurt and pain and terror, like a five-year-old awakening from a dream of monsters only to discover the monsters are real. "Darling," I say, burying my face in his hair, inhaling his wonderful sweet scent, a blend of Herbal Essences, Opium for Men and his own soft musk. "Oh, Alex," I sigh, and then we are sitting together on the blanket.

He doesn't know what to do, what to think. I wipe his tears away and kiss his face.

"This isn't some kind of joke, is it, Mulder?" he asks suspiciously.

"This isn't Mulder," I repeat, but softly, as I sweep the hair back from his brow and kiss him there.

************************************************************************

Is this a dream? Is that what this is? If so, what is the dream and where is the dreamer? As he pushes me back gently on the blanket and kisses me, I wonder, again, is this a hallucination? An acid flashback, perhaps? Something engendered by my spellcraft? His hard warm presence, his questing tongue seem real enough to me, but so did the bleeding wound I had earlier, which seems to have miraculously healed. What is real, and what is not?

"I'm real, Alex," he says between kisses, "I'm here." He pulls my T-shirt up and licks my chest, sucking and biting the nipples. I feel a stirring in my groin and realize I'm hard. His hand slips down to my shorts and beneath, then unsnaps me. Sitting up, he pulls my shorts down around my ankles. Then his full lips fasten on my cock, sucking me while he puts one, two fingers up me, stretching me. When the orgasm strikes, it slams me like a defensive tackle, and I grind out an inarticulate syllable and convulse, my hips bucking and sending come to the back of his throat.

When I come to, I'm lying on my back watching him lube himself, knowing that that big cock is all for me. I start to harden again. "You want this, don't you?" he asks, but it's a rhetorical question if ever there was one. "Turn over," he says, and I detect more than a note of the old imperiousness.

I flip over and feel him pressed against me, then firmly in. At the same time an arm wraps around my waist and the other grasps my stiffening cock. As he fucks me he bites my neck, licks my ear and expertly strokes me to another climax. And I realize: Mulder has not this man's skill, born of a lifetime of practice, now rushing me to the brink, now slowing to balance me teetering on the edge, till I'm begging, oh please oh please, then I'm over, into a vast dark well of sensation. I hear someone screaming and realize it's me; then I hear him from even farther off, a groan, a cry: "Alex! Alex!"

************************************************************************

It is even sweeter, this love, than ever I'd experienced it before or imagined it hence. I want more, much more. I must compress an eternity of joy into five hours.

************************************************************************

The nearest hotel, if you can call it that, is in Skylonda, some 15 miles up the road from La Honda, but it'll have to do. We eat at Alice's Restaurant and discuss the day's events. Monica is coaxing a bottle past little Will's lips; clearly, he'd rather be feeding from the Source. "They're somewhere in these mountains, I can feel it," says Reyes.

"Yes," I agree, "but haven't you been saying that all along?"

She ignores me, continuing to coo maternally to the baby. "What do the Gunmen have to say?" I ask, nibbling on a French fry.

"Shit. They have shit to say. No new anomalies," I answer, leaning back in my chair, itching for a smoke. "Spending patterns, everything, nothing new."

"We talked to that little waiter dude," says Johansen, gulping his pina colada. "He seemed to know something."

We all turn, and lean, as the case may be, to look at him. "Why Didn't you Tell Me?" I ask, speaking slowly, as to a retarded child.

He shrugs, ice clinking against his perfect teeth. "Hell, didn't seem important."

"Jesus, Johansen!" John Doggett exclaims.

"Sorry," he says sullenly, finishing off his drink. "Byers called me half an hour ago, and it sort of slipped my mind."

"Background on the kid? Where is it?"

"OK, OK, I'll get the reports. They're at the hotel, for Chrissakes!" he continues, rising and stretching in the maddening way he has. Moments later, it seems, no longer than the time it takes to pay the check and pack up the baby, Reyes, Doggett (and baby) and I are in my Jeep headed out to the woods.

************************************************************************

It's not that we haven't lost sleep over this thing. Indeed we have, for getting Mulder safely back to us has become our top priority, and we work virtually around the clock, we three, stopping only to grab sandwiches, coffee, meals on the run, the detritus of which lies strewn over desks and countertops. The AI software is capable of a great deal, it's true, but can only examine so many variables at once. Each one of billions of data points must be compared to x number of the others, simultaneously; and it is a daunting task for any but the biggest, baddest, studliest computers to handle. Fortunately, our PCs are state-of-the-art, but just the other minute I heard Langly mutter, in between chewing his ever-present child's candy item, "this is a job for a Cray." About an hour ago we came up with a list of all new or resumed PG & E accounts: there were 37 in the area over the last couple of days, none in any name or alias we recognize; Froggy passed on the information to Johansen's voicemail, as Doggett's mailbox was full.

"Got something. Maybe." Frohike says tensely, and I sit up.

"What?"

"A man Krycek's age and height, weight was seen in the Stanford clinic for hallucinations today. Said he was bleeding through a partially-severed, but healed, left arm."

Langly's chair comes down with a bang. "Name, address?"

"Name, 'Albert Craig'"

"Yes!" says Langly, punching the air.

"Address, '3444 Eastwood, Palo Alto."

"Good Lord," I say, stroking my beard thoughtfully. "Call Doggett at once."

************************************************************************

Even in the dark, it is possible to determine that the house is Victorian, therefore quite old, and it is inhabited by someone's grandma. "No, Mr. Doggett," she says patiently. "I'd think I'd know it if there were two young homosexual hoodlums living in my home. But you're welcome to look around."

I leave Reyes and Scully to talk to her, the older lady making much of darling Will, while I make a quick search of the rooms, upstairs and down: nothing. "Damn damn DAMN!" I swear, taking the steps down two at a time. "False alarm, ladies, sorry Mrs. Baker. They gave a dummy address. But at least we know they're in the area."

"Why'd they come back to California, anyway?" asks Scully in the car. "They could have flown anywhere in the world."

"The arrogance of the man. Some of his former boss must have rubbed off on him. Figured he'd be too clever to catch."

"And plus, he's a powerful witch," Reyes says quietly, and unhelpfully, from the back seat. "Don't forget that."

"So powerful that he can't heal his own psychosis, or whatever it was?"

"That," she says, patting a soft baby blankie around Will, "could be the result of a spell gone bad, John."

"Hm?" I glance at her in the rearview mirror as we begin to climb Page Mill Road.

"If you cast a negative, a harmful, spell, it'll come back and bite you in the ass."

"Oh," says Scully, starting a little. "My terrible nightmares! Do you think - naw!"

"I do think," Reyes says. "And I also think you're safe now, Dana, from nightmares or those that stalk in the daytime."

************************************************************************

Sometime in the night I awaken. Mulder is touching me, touching my face, then I feel his lips on mine in a gentle kiss. Then he says, "reverse the spell." That is all; and it isn't his voice at all, and I sit up, my heart pounding. Beside me, my lover lies sleeping. "Reverse the spell," says the voice again, a draft blowing between the words, a draft and all eternity. I shiver, but rise and begin to collect the necessary paraphernalia: grey candles, incense, my green marble altar pentacle, and lastly the bucket of sand, maroon-colored dried blood swirled through it, plastic figurines still stuck head-down. "I call thee my Goddess, Kali, Astarte, Mari, Quan Yin, come to me thy humble servant Alexei," I chant, raising the athame, its sharp tip pointed at the waning moon. I light the candles and dump out the bucket of sand, righting the figurines. "I hereby ask thy assistance in reversing the spell, even though it be my undoing. I also ask that my friend Fox William Mulder, who is innocent of any wrongdoing, be spared thy vengeance."

************************************************************************

It is perhaps 10 PM, and we've settled in for the night, Will in his rollaway crib, playing with a mobile of flying fish that we've packed (because we ARE the flying fish, Dana tells me solemnly), my arm around my lover. My cell phone rings, but it's on her side. "Can you answer that, Dana?" I ask.

"OK. Um-hm. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, we have 'em." She clicks off. "The Gunmen!" she says excitedly. "They found it, the anomaly!"

"It? Well, what is it?"

"Webvan!" she crows. "Oh, Webvan! They only made one delivery to La Honda day before yesterday, and we have the address! Oh, my God!"

"Shit," I swear softly. Showdown in Stickville. "What's the address?"

"You weren't thinking of going there alone at night, just us, in the dark, were you?"

"No, dear. I'm sure John will want us to wait till morning, when we can see what we're doing. And it'll give him time to mobilize the SWAT team."

************************************************************************

Haha! NOW we have 'em, the slippery little devils! The net we cast is very quickly tightening into a noose. To say I am jubilant is to understate the obvious. But we must proceed with caution. Just to test our information, I do a drive-by, a quicky reconnaissance which reveals a large estate with one light on, neither Mulder nor Krycek visible, dark-colored Porsche in the driveway, which I happily sabotage by removing the distributor. Too bad I didn't think to bring sugar or rice with me! A bit of smoke drifts from one of several chimneys, this one coming from a bedroom, I'll bet. They're probably asleep, their guard down; this would be a great time for me to just slip in there and bust their lazy, loose, homosexual asses. Well, I have to do it up right, which means we'll be back at daybreak to disrupt their little nappy-poos or the unspeakable things they probably do to each other on an hourly basis; they'll have plenty of time to sleep in jail.

We convene at around midnight in Skylonda, everyone talking at once. "OK, OK," I say, "this is how we'll do it: we'll bash in the front door with a ram, throw tear gas at once. Gas masks for everyone! Don't use your weapons, I repeat, do NOT use your weapons until and unless you absolutely have to."

"Won't we need a SWAT team for this?"

"Called already, and waiting for our signal. We do, however, want Mulder and Krycek alive, not 'accidentally' shot. They can be here in an hour or so, via chopper to Skylonda, then we'll proceed using Jeeps and armored vehicles."

"They'd better not hurt Mulder!" Scully says grimly. "Or they'll have me to deal with."

************************************************************************

One moment he's inside me and he's coming, coming and the next he's kneeling next to me, holding something that glints in the moonlight. "Your athame, darling," he says and then it is at my throat. I feel the cold steel blade sliding back and forth slightly; then a stinging sensation, and something warm and liquidy is running down my neck. He puts his lips to it, greedily sucking the blood. "Your essence," he murmurs. I feel the familiar stirring in my crotch; he is massively erect. The knife still at my throat, he mounts me swiftly. "Sweetheart, when you come you cut yourself more. A little bit of pain...you'll like it, I promise!" and he begins to thrust. Oh, God, Mulder, whoever you are, you can fuck like nobody's business! "More!" I gasp and he strokes me with his left hand. I come frantically, spasmodically, and the athame cutting into me, the sear-burn of the blade, is the greatest erotic thrill of my life, and I come again, as though I had not already done so.

He licks up the blood, then he is coming like a freight train, pushing into me hard, yelping, shoving great quantities of fluid into me. We lie gasping for a moment. "That was fuckin' fantastic, whoever you are," I say, kissing him.

"I know," he says. "But we're not done."

************************************************************************

The SWAT team lands and people mill about, shooting the bull, here and there drinking a Coke, lighting a cigarette. I retire to my motel room to feed Will. "They'd better not hurt Mulder." This sentence repeats itself endlessly in my preconscious, like an old movie reel, sometimes more audibly, sometimes less so. Oh God. Oh, poor Mulder! I can imagine Krycek with his Kalashnikov, and our fire, far from friendly; and I'm so afraid my love will be caught in the crossfire. Oh God, please protect Mulder.

************************************************************************

The anomaly function has done its job well and we've found them at last. We toast our victory with a bottle of Jack Daniels Froggy has conveniently stowed in a cabinet. "Hey," he says, looking even more worried than usual. "They don't have 'em yet, you know."

"But they will, dude," Langly says confidently. "They will."

************************************************************************

My darling Alex. What a joy it is to fuck and fuck you and suck you and thus indicate to you the extent of my love for you. Or something equally sappy. As I lie rimming you, hearing you moan and beg me to perform all sorts of little tricks and favors upon your beautiful body, I want this moment to last forever. We lick and suck each other until we both come, spurting thick white liquid down our throats. "Again, again," he pleads, and I am more than happy to oblige. We couple repeatedly, amid protestations of love on both sides, and then the first pale streaks of dawn appear in the eastern sky.

************************************************************************

Scully is grim-faced, white and silent as we head toward departure. It's been decided that she stay behind with Will and that a SWAT team member stay with them. She's unhappy with the arrangement, but what else can we do? Her baby needs her. We can't risk her or the child getting hurt, of course. Moreover, I'm beginning to admit to myself, we can't let her watch Mulder die.

************************************************************************

I awaken at 4 AM, in bed with Mulder snoozing at my side. When I poke him, he looks up at me and smiles that open dimply smile. "Hey Alex," he says.

"You're you. You're Mulder!"

His brow creases slightly. "Of course I'm me. Who else would I be?"

"You have no memory of making love with me all night long?"

"No. Just a dream. Very vague...but I was asleep, Alex."

"Well, now it's time to get up!"

"At 4 AM?"

"Yes," I say. "Get dressed. Grab a gun off the rack. We're about to be besieged."

************************************************************************

Of course, I'm wondering whether the hallucinations have come back, and I glance doubtfully, and repeatedly at Krycek, who is standing at my side on the deck overlooking the forest; but I learn soon enough that he's right: at the first crack of dawn, as it were, the assault begins. They give us a first chance, perhaps our last, delivered in Doggett's nasal New York accent via megaphone. "Turn yourselves in. Drop your weapons, come out, hands up, you won't be harmed."

We're not in the direct line of fire; we have the second story of the house between us and them; not until they beat their way through the underbrush and take aim at us, which they appear to be doing. Now. I should know better; Krycek dodges under the wall, yanking me down beside him. Popping up, he lets them have a blast from the Kalashnikov and suddenly three people are down; whether they are men or women, whether they had interesting, worthwhile lives, we'll never know. They've gained admittance, if from the sound the heavy oak door makes as it's broken inward is any indication, however, and have thrown gas canisters. Krycek runs to the glass doors to the deck and bangs them shut. "They'll be coming through in a minute," he says tersely. "When they do, shoot before they can. That's your only directive, Mulder."

There is gunfire from the ground, which we return. The Uzi feels strange in my hands; I can't possibly guess how Krycek is managing his; but he does, and fells two more SWAT team members.

Then it happens: Doggett and Johansen, as if in slow-motion, opening the glass doors. Behind them, Young shoots right through the glass, catching me in the arm and causing me to drop my weapon. Beside me I see Alex fall, awkwardly clutching his leg, grimacing from the pain of a serious wound: Doggett has shot him, everything still in slo-mo, oh my darling, what have they done to you, oh my god the pain is everywhere, it's everything, what must it be like for you? It is suffusing my fading consciousness with a sharp agony, and then that, too, shades away into the greyness that is covering my world.

************************************************************************

Our losses were heavy and grievous: seven men who would never come to the aid of a citizen in need, who would never subdue a desperate criminal again. Krycek and Mulder, wounded and losing consciousness, are loaded onto gurneys, thence into a just-arrived helicopter and flown to Stanford University Hospital Trauma Center, where they will be triaged ahead of my dead and dying men.

************************************************************************

We regain consciousness at about the same time, strapped in four-point restraints to narrow hospital beds. Each of us is wearing a sickly-blue print hospital gown and nothing else; each has a large bandage, on arm and leg respectively and a couple of IV drips: glucose, saline, morphine, I would guess. "Mulder," I whisper, "Oh the gods, Mulder!"

"I know. It's like a fuckin-ow! My arm! -- nightmare!"

"That we can't wake from."

"Yeah. I can't move, Alex."

"Neither can I."

It is useless to struggle, I know that; the leather straps which bind us might as well be iron. "What's gonna happen to us, Alex?" Mulder asks.

"I dunno," I say, but I do, too, know. Jail, a big courtroom scene where we'll be tried as co-defendants, the eyes of the families of the men we killed looking at us accusingly, Skinner's most of all, the charming ex-wife staring at us murderously; the reporters, maybe TV cameras too for all I know. Then to follow, the icing on the cake: prison, hard time at some maximum-security joint. No more romps in bed for us, no more gourmet dinners under the redwoods, in the mountains, in the desert, by the side of a burbling brook, no, not for us the riding of beautiful and valuable horses, the playing of basketball, the swimming; no more adventures, no more fun. Just four dreary grey prison walls, sere, dank, and the horrors of life "on the inside," the gangs, the rape, the nonchalant murders, until we die.

***

End of Part 1

  
Archived: November 13, 2001 


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